Madness abounds
For years now we have been told that the state is inefficient, civil servants a hinderance not a help, that there is always room to find savings, that taxes never have to rise.
And yet taxes have risen considerably, an ageing population, more generous pensions and a smaller proportion of the population in work creating wealth makes higher taxes inevitable.
But the political agenda is so skewed that members of the shadow cabinet, who when in power oversaw the collapse of our armed forces, failed to build homes or prisons, slashed investment, sacked police officers and ran down schools and the courts and about everything else, then tell us that we can increase the defence budget by 1% or 2% of GDP from “savings”.
Well, you can’t.
Which leads us to the farce of trying to cut our already inadequate benefits system, except for pensioners, in order to try to balance the books. Yet, the UK’s tax take is still low in comparison with its European rivals, we have plenty of space to increase taxes and we need to do just that.
The trouble is that the public has been convinced by 45 years of right wing propaganda that you can have your cake and eat it.
Why are people so disaffected with the mainstream? Because they have been told that low taxes make us richer and they don’t see it, in fact they have seen the opposite for decades. At the same time the things they used to depend on, Trade Unions, reasonably well paid local jobs, council housing, well run and funded services have gone. The NHS is crumbling, schools are not good enough, benefits are awful, private pensions are dead, pay bad, companies pretend to care and don’t.
And yet who do we blame? The civil servants?
Come on! If you slash the state, standing around blaming the state when things go wrong is pure hypocrisy.
In short we need to tax more, spend more, invest more and pay people more.
We have had 45 years of “rewarding the risk takers”, destroying workers rights, pay and benefits, it has not worked.
Doing the same thing a thousand times and expecting a different result is the definition of madness.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.