Wednesday 24 August 2011

I'll tell you what's even more depressing...

From The Telegraph:

For all the Government’s talk of austerity, something seems to be going slightly wrong. On Monday, The Daily Telegraph revealed that two thirds of council executives received pay rises last year, and yesterday, it was reported that the Coalition is generally failing to gain control of public sector pay, with automatic pay rises still the norm.

Aside from the envy such news provokes in the private sector, this news is hugely important – and hugely dispiriting. With salaries making up almost 80 per cent of budgets, the cuts that the Government needs to make to reduce the deficit will simply not be possible without radical pay reform.


The article is well worth a read, but the author makes the usual deliberate Tory schoolboy error: "with salaries making up almost 80 per cent of budgets".

I'm not sure what budgets he's talking about but public sector salaries and pensions add up to less than a third of all government spending, i.e. total spending = about £700 billion; there are 7 million people officially on the public sector payroll x average salary £25,000 = £175 billion plus a bit for pensions. So if they think they can eliminate the deficit of about £140 billion by reducing spending on public sector salaries, they would have to reduce it by eighty per cent.

They'd save a lot of time if they had a closer peek at the £280 billion a year which the government pays to private businesses for the provision of this, that and the other. But that doesn't fit in with the Tory class warfare narrative, does it, whereby all public sector employees are leeches (no more than half of them are leeches) and privately owned businesses are the holy of holies (even though most of those with their snouts in the public trough are the most corrupt and wasteful of all)?

17 comments:

Barnacle Bill said...

Even more disheartening is that a lot of those privately owned businesses with their snouts in the public trough have their ownership in a Tory MP's blind trust.
Or are owned by a friend of the family of a Conservative MP.
It's just one big roundabout of corruption at Westminster!

James Higham said...

I think is "applied austerity", i.e. they choose who shall bear the austerity and who won't.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, you can do the sums yourself by totting up the number of dust bin men, coppers, teachers, nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, social workers etc and you get to about two million, let's double it for inevitable back up staff and call it four million, out of about eight million employed directly or indirectly by the government.

BB, yes of course, they are following the trail blazed by New Labour. They make the pre-1997 Tories look like choirboys.

JH: "applied austerity" or indeed "selective austerity"!

Anonymous said...

From The Telegraph:
via MBK I guess.

AC1

Lola said...

"D, you can do the sums yourself by totting up the number of dust bin men, coppers, teachers, nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, social workers " Well, you can deduct from that lot all the ones that need not be on the public payroll, e.g. the nationalised education industry and the nationalised health industry.

But I agree. There are all sorts of 'leeches' sucking on the taxpayer teat, including fake charities and fake businesses.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC1, yup.

L, "vouchers".

Lola said...

MW - Yum yum.

Talking to a member of staff trying to get proper medical and personal care for her aged mother from the NHS and The SS (as another cleint of mine refers to Social Services) her story is clear evidence of absolute producer capture in both mad bureaucracies.

Robin Smith said...

Very good point.

The real battle is with oligarchy and kleptocracy.

Not their servants.

Then again though, it is what all servants vote for every time.

So what do you do?

Ps Im using the term servant instead of slave on trial. I've been getting a hammering from colleagues because slaves is too true and harsh a term for us apparently.

Anonymous said...

I don't see why vouchers are better than more cash in the LVT.

People are better at deciding how to direct their money than bureaucrats are.

AC1

Mark Wadsworth said...

RS, "servant" implies that they get paid for doing what they do.

AC1, cash vouchers is better than state provision. Call it "earmarked citizen's income" if you so wish. As long as the amount earmarked is less than the full cost to the user, i.e. the user has to pay some small top-up, then no harm done.

Anonymous said...

Then the best voucher value is zero (and cut out the voucher bureaucracy) as some may not want to purchase said product.

Bayard said...

Anon, so you want the poor to be unable to afford healthcare or education?

A better idea for the fit would be to have a "no claims bonus" like the insurance companies, except this bonus would be paid in cash, and for the childless to get a retirement bonus if they reach pensionable age without drawing any education vouchers.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B: "so you want the poor to be unable to afford healthcare or education?"

Good question.

"A better idea for the fit would be to have a "no claims bonus" like the insurance companies, except this bonus would be paid in cash"

Not really necessary, it's just low-cost mass insurance. If you remain 100% healthy until you drop dead, isn't that bonus enough?

"for the childless to get a retirement bonus if they reach pensionable age without drawing any education vouchers"

Hang about - everybody got the vouchers when they were school children, surely? It's like childless people whining about Child Benefit, they were young once, weren't they?

Bayard said...

" isn't that bonus enough?"

remember, 1. we're dealing with the Envious here and 2, if it were enough, people would take more care of themselves under the present system, which they demonstrably don't. The NCB would be money well spent as far as the gov't was concerned, because people would have a cash incentive to go for preventative medicine, which would save the country money in the long run.

"everybody got the vouchers when they were school children, surely"

Not if they were privately educated.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B: "Not if they were privately educated."

By a quirk of history, I did go to private school, which is my own good fortune, and my children also go to private school. I'd love education vouchers, they're good for my kids and good for everybody else's kids.

Charlie B. said...

I've no idea how many, but "natural wastage" of staff leaving routinely (retirement, death, voluntary unemployment [e.g. because inherited parent estate], job in private sector etc etc) SO LONG AS THEY ARE NOT REPLACED.

Anonymous said...

That's probably 80% of council budgets.