What puzzles and depresses me is the claim on the one hand that we are the most highly taxed we’ve been in a generation, yet all public services seem to be going down the pan for lack of funding. Can anyone explain to me how this can be?
That is, it has to be said, an excellent question. Thankfully, it is not too difficult to provide an explanation.
The UK government has since 2010 sought to reduce its overall level of expenditure. As is obvious from the above equation, GDP must have been reduced as a result.
Since government spending does,inevitably, become someone else’s income, because contrary to the impression most politicians present it is not money poured into a black hole, consumption (C) is also reduced by cuts in government spending.
Governments since 2010 have also sought to reduce the level of benefits and other payments made by it, reducing the capacity for consumption as a consequence.
Tax is high because government hasn’t been taxing enough.
Anyone want to wager that “the public sector is shit at delivering services” doesn’t make it on to his list?
I’m pretty sure that my consumption is reduced by Government confiscation.
Captain Potato’s Leap Year Law posits that the impact of G on (C+I) can only ever be positive.
It’s a complete mystery why a country that’s rapidly being colonised by Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Albania and similar is finding itself getting poorer by the day.
Maybe Brexit did this?
Maybe lots of the money is going on woke crap instead of services. Did that make his list?
More in / less out and the problem is not the machine?
It all seems to have been getting worse since about 2000.
Mind you it was also pretty bad up till early 1980s
A brief halcyon period there.
Perhaps a subject for a new degree course?
If government’s not taking your money, you still have it & can spend it. So it’ll be someone’s income. So WTF’s he talking about?
BiS – he’s talking about how, despite the highest tax burden ever, the British government and all of its noodly appendages are now effectively bankrupt.
And they are, btw. Things are unbelievably fucked.
So, £24Bn spent to keep unemployed migrants in our country since 2020 alone.
Why? Fuck You, that’s why.
Every British city and major town is turning into something east of the Suez, south of the Med. Uncounted and uncountered hordes pouring in every day, the vast, overwhelming majority of whom are massive net tax consumers of our frighteningly indebted public sector, which has run out of net taxpayers to soak.
So it turns out the swivel eyed bigots were right, again.
Give you an example: yesterday I spoke to an NHS nurse. Nice lady, just off the boat from India last month.
She speaks thickly accented, slightly broken English, but I could understand about 75% of what she was telling me. The rest of her family are joining her in Blighty next month.
We will need to import more nurses to take care of them…
Camp of the Sinners.
Too much is being spent on the bureaucrats and not enough on the services?
all public services seem to be going down the pan with the standard excuse being lack of funding.
Long ago a couple of my university heads of department ticked me off for publishing lots of good stuff but not bothering to cultivate a large research grant inflow. “All right for you” they said, “but what about your colleagues who don’t have an ability to invent cheap ways of doing things?”
I dare say government employment is rife with people being told to do things in an extravagant way.
Yerwot? “A is going down, therefore A+B+C is going down.” Sums raises its head.
Steve, “And they are, btw. Things are unbelievably fucked.”
If you watch the BBC et al, you know that things are fucked. To know that they are unbelievably fucked, you need to be watching ‘social media’.
Well, we knew they’d do it eventually. They’ve been trying long enough. Trying different ways. This & that. Even more of that. We knew succeed in the end.
Steve,
“And they are, btw. Things are unbelievably fucked.”
But they’re still talking about building East-West Rail, linking Cambridge and Oxford even though Dr Beeching had the numbers showing no-one was using it 50 years ago, back when a luxury car wasn’t as good as a 10 year old Toyota Yaris.
That’s just something that a minister could stop right now. Just stop writing any contracts, renegotiate down any that are running, and boot out the staff working on it. Yes, the BBC and the Guardian and various train wankers will complain about it, but so fucking what? They’re never going to vote Conservative anyway, so fuck ’em.
This is why I want the Conservative Party to be annihilated at the next election. Labour are going to win anyway, and will probably be worse, but in 5 years time, I don’t want the Conservatives back. I want someone like Milei running the place who will take a chainsaw to the state. And that’s only going to happen if Reform do so much damage that they never get up again. Ever.
“What puzzles and depresses me is the claim on the one hand that we are the most highly taxed we’ve been in a generation, yet all public services seem to be going down the pan for lack of funding. Can anyone explain to me how this can be?”
This has to be the most stupid thing that I have read in years. Can anyone explain? Yes pretty much anyone can explain, it’s hardly an unfathomable mystery is it? The government doesn’t spend the money on public services, it pisses it away on pretty much anything else. In any case, even with almost limitless funding the public services would still be rubbish, it is in their nature to be hopelessly inefficient.
What puzzles and depresses me is the claim on the one hand that we are the most highly taxed we’ve been in a generation, yet all public services seem to be going down the pan for lack of funding. Can anyone explain to me how this can be?
Lack of competence? The incompetent always claim (a) the problem is under-funding, and (b) more money will solve the problem. And the problem never gets fixed because funding isn’t the issue. Lack of competence is the issue.
One glance at Murphy’s career and you can see why this would never occur to him.
Dennis,
There is some incompetence, some idleness, but a lot of the problem is all the total wank that the state does. The first is hard to address, the last isn’t. And over the past 15 years, the total wank has gone into overdrive.
Like the Welsh want their parking meters to have a Welsh language option. And no-one sensibly just says “fuck off, everyone speaks English”. So now, you have to go to Metric and ask for the multiple language option that they sell to Switzerland and Belgium. And Metric are perfectly happy to take your money. And of course, you’re going to want to test all of that, so you have to hire a bunch of Welsh speakers to do that. All for a tiny number of assholes who will complain.
Or the amount of pamphlets and website content written for non-binary people. Nothing against the trannies, but I’m sure people just used to manage this fine. I’m sure that 95% of trannies are reasonable people and it works out. But instead of telling the assholes to fuck off, someone creates monumental amounts of stuff around it.
Or the government insisting on Gender Pay information. Or how it writes press releases about companies that underpaid on the minimum wage, mostly old stories involving sums of under £100 for each member of staff per year, mostly just misunderstandings of what could and couldn’t be included.
Remember Tim, taxes don’t pay for spending, in Richard Murphy’s world. They are entirely independent and separate.
Unless it’s convenient for today’s message to align the two. But that approach can then be ignored to make an entirely different point…
Western Bloke –
Not knowing when or how to say “Fuck off” constitutes incompetence.
Short answer: a combination of Jerry Pourelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and Washington Monument Syndrome
It does rather come across as someone landing a £100k/year job, blowing it all on coke and hookers, then demanding a pay rise because their employer doesn’t pay them enough to live on…
@Steve – “£24Bn spent to keep unemployed migrants in our country since 2020 alone”
That’s entirely self-inflicted. If we permitted them to work they’d be paying us taxes instead of us paying them to do nothing.
Very amusing Charles. There is a limit to the number of “Turkish” barbers the country needs. And it doesn’t work like that. It’s taxes less the cost of services received. Most of the dross would still produce a negative number. You have to be quite a way up the earning scale to be a net taxpayer.
Charles – do you feel any symptoms before a bout of bufoonery overtakes you? I only ask in case a bit of a lie-down or a herbal cigarette might be more soothing and less embarassing.
Its weird that the Charles’s of this world seem to have not noticed that several of their favourite nostrums have been categorically refuted by real world experimentation in recent years. The first being that ‘diversity’ improves an organisation – the NHS is 77% female and 20% (and growing fast) non-white, yet is universally agreed to be a basket case, and far more poorly run than when it employed 99% UK born white people and was run mostly by men. The second being that immigration is the solution to economic woes. We’ve imported several million new people into the UK inside the last few years and the economy is on its knees. When are they going to accept they are 100% wrong? Or will it be the usual ‘The benefits will only be seen with even more X’?
Kudos to Carl Stevens for wrestling with Murphy on his understanding of mortgages in the US and A.
Ouch. A rare occasion when Murph is right – 30 year fixes in the US.