More blah-waffle on the BBC about this whole National Insurance hike-versus-spending cuts debate:
"You cannot effectively get £27bn of savings in one year(1)... without laying thousands of people off (2) and without causing losses of business (3) and loss of jobs(4)," [Gordon Brown] said.
Well duh.
1) Yes you can. BIS £22 billion, DFID £9 billion, DCMS £5 billion, DEFRA £5 billion plus DECC £3 billion. Hey, that's twice as much as £27 billion. Stick on £18 billion for EU costs (according to Dick P, I thought it was 'only' £16 billion), and that's nearly three times as much as £27 billion.
2) That's what 'savings' means, to 'save' (i.e. 'not waste') £27 billion, you'd need to scrap up to half a million non-jobs. We're not talking about saving money on paper clips, we're talking about not doing things that destroy value. 'Thousands' is a funny euphemism for 'half a million' but not technically wrong, I suppose.
3) Ho-hum. They take taxes off the productive economy to be able to 'support business'? How does that work?
4) We covered that in point (1), there are no extra marks for repetition. Further, what he means is 'loss of non-jobs', not 'loss of jobs' generally. As a rule of thumb, raising the taxes to pay for a non-job in public sector destroys about 1.5 jobs in the private sector, and many non-job destroy another half a proper job via form filling and regulation, so there's no reason to assume that overall employment levels would go down if all the non-jobs were scrapped.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
1/4 - must try harder
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6 comments:
Just to confirm all you say from my personal experience a rise of 1% in employers NIC will cost my business £150 per month. For that I could give one of my part time staff the extra hours she would like to give her more income. Or if NIC was CUT now I could give her the extra hours now.
Note, there are tens of thousands of small businesses like mine employeing more people that all the UK's big businesses. So multiply that 1% jobs cost up by that and see how many businesses coul employ more people in proper wealth creating jobs.
"BIS £22 billion"? for what, FFS? I wonder how much industry would save if the BIS was abolished and no longer interfered.
Department of Energy and Climate Change?
FFS (again). I know I'm a bit out of touch, but we have a gov't department dedicated to the biggest non-threat of the century? My flabber is well and truly ghasted.
Thanks for the anti-canvasser info, Mark, (not that any bother to come all the way out here, but I suppose I might be accosted when I'm in town).
L, it's a 1% hike in Employer's and a 1% hike in Employee's NIC, so you lose £150 and your employees lose £150.
B, industry would save about £22 bn, I think. The few good bits that BIS do would then be privately funded, but as these would only be funded if they made a profit, the cost to industry would be net nothing.
As to DECC, if anybody has the nerve, please check out their pub quiz.
Brown see's these departments as the businesses and jobs.
"As to DECC, if anybody has the nerve, please check out their pub quiz."
It's them that has the nerve to publish such lies. I notice they don't have an answer to the question: "How were the Romans able to grow vineyards in Yorkshire?"
B: "How were the Romans able to grow vineyards in Yorkshire?"
Duh, because the evil Romans polluted the world with lead pipes and all pollution causes Global Warming, I'd have thought that was obvious.
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