Monday 17 December 2012

Fun Online Polls: Government spending & Integral garages

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll:

Who gets the most cash from the UK government?

Welfare claimants and OAPs - 11%
Public sector workers and pensioners - 29%
Nominally private sector businesses (whether for goods and services supplied or as subsidies) - 60%


Sixty per cent of you were correct; that type of spending is about 40% of UK government spending. If the UK government really wanted to make cuts, that is the place to start.

It would also appear that the second largest item is welfare and pensions* spending, but not by a huge margin, it's a bit more than 30% (but no more than 35%) and the total salary and pension costs of six million public sector employees is a bit less than 30% (but no less than 25%).

* Three-quarters of that is old age pensions of course, working age welfare is surprisingly small amounts.
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The comments to my previous post show that there is quite a divergence of opinion as to whether integral garages are a good idea (rather than having an extra downstairs room).

That's entirely a matter of personal taste and preference of course (for example, if you have motorbikes or bicycles etc which you need to store securely), but what's the majority opinion?

The only way to test this is to observe the real world and compare how many people have converted an integral garage into an extra downstairs room and vice versa.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

7 comments:

Patrick said...

"Nominally private sector businesses (whether for goods and services supplied or as subsidies)"

What kind of things are we looking at here?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, it is a very, very long list.

Bank bail outs and guarantees, arts council and film subsidies, windmill subsidies, green subsidies, agricultural land subsidies and housing benefit, PFI and PP overspend, export guarantees, most of DFID spending, overspend on weapons (what MoD get up to is incompetent to the point of being criminal, troops are dying and they don't care), IT projects (NHS Spine), all the Work Programme and A4E type stuff, carbon permits-auctions, spending money on removing harmless white asbestos, tax breaks/subsidies for pensions companies, HomeBuy schemes, Funding for Lending scheme.

Most of these items are in the £1 billion to £10 billion per annum range, none of them in isolation would bankrupt us, but if you have thirty or forty biggies, then it all adds up.

Robin Smith said...

That's not bad, for every 10 people, there is 1 civil servant looking after them.

Dependency Society. Yup!

Surely people will complain about this en masse soon?

Robin Smith said...

All my neighbours have done so with their integral garages. They now park their excess cars on the street for free. And sell their homes for £50 grand more.

neil craig said...

Basically all the welfare spending
is a small fraction of the total but it has to be there for advertising purposes so that the parasites can say "You want to cut government spending - you nasty person you want to starve the widows and orphans".

I am sure a lot of the bureaucrats, quangoists and fakecharities would benefit from a little starvation.

Might be worth posting that list list here Mark

Mark Wadsworth said...

RS, yup. And if you didn't need yours for bikes, yours would have probably gone the same way.

NC, yup, it's called "shroud waving".

But welfare spending is also there so that the authoritarians can say how hard they are "clamping down on Britain's bloated welfare state".

So both sides use it to their own advantage.

Bayard said...

Welfare spending is also there so as not to have starving people rioting and damaging landowners' property. Also, having dead bodies on the streets would make us look even more third world than we do now.