600, 000 jobs cut in the public sector = 700, 000 job cuts in the private sector

tomterm8

Generali wrote: »

I agree and, speaking as someone who had a longish period of enforced unemployment, feel that it is awful that people will have to lose their jobs and in some cases will suffer terribly as a result.

However if the money isn't there to pay them then they can't continue in employment.

It's not necessarily the case that I am against 'spending cuts', I just think the way the government is going about them is foolish. Blocking NHS cuts is a big mistake. We could, for example, save a heck of a lot of money privatising the NHS dental service, and frankly it would do little to harm. We could change the current scenario so that routine doctor care is charged, but that major operations remain free at the point of delivery. Prescriptions should be charged throughout the UK, rather than just in England.

Instead, we are stepping into a scenario where cuts are being made in a blanket way, without any obvious thought. The science budget being cut by 25%, where the research shows this relatively small budget actually returns a profit to the UK taxpayer over the long term, by increases in productivity.

I am all for smartly reducing spending, but we seem to be going about things like a small budget horror movie. Slash, slash, slash but little plot line and no thought.

I was very disappointed in the elections. There was no cogent discussion of what Britain should do, as a society, and what areas we can abandon. It was all BS, to be frank.

grubby23

Generali wrote: »

How do you want to pay them? That is the problem.

Easy. Just print money out of thin air.

grubby23

tomterm8 wrote: »

Blocking NHS cuts is a big mistake.

Completely agree with that. Too much money is wasted, especially for all this NHS managers. The worrying thing is that they are still running this graduate schemes to "educate" even more useless bureaucrats.

tomterm8 wrote: »

Instead, we are stepping into a scenario where cuts are being made in a blanket way, without any obvious thought. The science budget being cut by 25%, where the research shows this relatively small budget actually returns a profit to the UK taxpayer over the long term, by increases in productivity.

Makes a lot of sense again. Yes, funding to the universities should be cut, but do not cut it for useful stuff, i.e., engineering, sciences etc.
There are just so many layers we need and in particular all this Micky Mouse degrees should not see one sent of the taxpayers money.

amcluesent

>You mean like sacking 1400 police officers? <

Bizzies have had a good session at the trough these last decades.

Only one in 10 police officers on frontline

London boroughs where one in 10 police is off sick

Police pay – the great overtime bonanza

Mr_Mumble

marklv wrote: »

The outsourcing mania started under Blair, not Brown. Of course the alternative would have been 13m people working directly for the state, which would have resulted in all sorts of lurid headlines on the Mail and the Express!!

The alternative would have been not to outbid private sector enterprise for the value of labour when the jobs market was booming. It may seem a dream now but the reason millions of folk from eastern Europe came here was the availability of jobs (let's not get onto the subject of Labour thinking only 13,000 would come!)

Libertarian utopia? You need a psychiatrist if you believe this. If every service was privatised you would end up with huge costs for everything, as the incentive for the companies providing the services is profit. Yes, you would pay less tax but you would be paying enormously for rubbish collection, policing, street lighting, etc. At the end of the day the costs to the public would much, much higher.

First, private organisations need not be profit-making. Second, the state is often not the solution for the provision of services (Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for their empirical work related to this subject).

Third, just because profit-making companies have profit margins doesn't make them more costly. You're taking one element of cost (the return on investment expected by investors who provide capital) and ignoring everything else. If profit-making is so costly then how do the likes of Tesco, Asda/Walmart, Sainsbury's, Aldi & Lidl compete on cost with Waitrose or the Co-op? And if rubbish collection is so expensive why have so many councils outsourced this work to profit-making companies rather than kept this service function in-house? Profit-margins are irrelevant relative to all the efficiencies that profit-making brings.

How do you define 'worthwhile'? Some accountants locked in ivory towers somewhere.

As opposed to politicians in an ivory tower? 'Worthwhile' is best defined by individuals using their own money, accumulated by their own labour, deciding what is worthwhile. Individuals do this by buying goods and services from organisations that employ those accountants locked in an ivory tower.

edit: forgot this

marklv wrote: »

Work needs to be done, so you recruit staff - do you get the logic?

I simply don't agree that it was the government that needed to do this work. Fundamentally I don't understand why the public sector should provide services (note this does not mean government shouldn't allocate resources for, say, primary education, imho it should, but it shouldn't be in charge of providing that service).

marklv

Mr_Mumble wrote: »

The alternative would have been not to outbid private sector enterprise for the value of labour when the jobs market was booming. It may seem a dream now but the reason millions of folk from eastern Europe came here was the availability of jobs (let's not get onto the subject of Labour thinking only 13,000 would come!)

First, private organisations need not be profit-making. Second, the state is often not the solution for the provision of services (Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for their empirical work related to this subject).

Third, just because profit-making companies have profit margins doesn't make them more costly. You're taking one element of cost (the return on investment expected by investors who provide capital) and ignoring everything else. If profit-making is so costly then how do the likes of Tesco, Asda/Walmart, Sainsbury's, Aldi & Lidl compete on cost with Waitrose or the Co-op? And if rubbish collection is so expensive why have so many councils outsourced this work to profit-making companies rather than kept this service function in-house? Profit-margins are irrelevant relative to all the efficiencies that profit-making brings.

As opposed to politicians in an ivory tower? 'Worthwhile' is best defined by individuals using their own money, accumulated by their own labour, deciding what is worthwhile. Individuals do this by buying goods and services from organisations that employ those accountants locked in an ivory tower.

edit: forgot this
I simply don't agree that it was the government that needed to do this work. Fundamentally I don't understand why the public sector should provide services (note this does not mean government shouldn't allocate resources for, say, primary education, imho it should, but it shouldn't be in charge of providing that service).

You know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Everything to you needs to fit into a capitalist economic model in order to make sense - and this is where you are fundamentally wrong. Very wrong. I cannot understand why you are so maniacally opposed to government employment when every major country in the world does this. The state needs to retain control of certain essential public services because you can't simply entrust private organisations with tasks that are traditionally the responsibility of government. Otherwise, why have a govenrnment at all? Why have elections and MPs? Just privatise the state itself and let the country be run by Alan Sugar et al. What a nightmare that would be!!

marklv

StevieJ wrote: »

Won't be long now.

Won't be long before this Con-Dem abortion of a government will finally be strangled by an internal rebellion and we'll have another election. The rebels are just waiting for David Miliband to be elected as Labour leader and then the fun will start.

marklv

tomterm8 wrote: »

It's not necessarily the case that I am against 'spending cuts', I just think the way the government is going about them is foolish. Blocking NHS cuts is a big mistake. We could, for example, save a heck of a lot of money privatising the NHS dental service, and frankly it would do little to harm. We could change the current scenario so that routine doctor care is charged, but that major operations remain free at the point of delivery. Prescriptions should be charged throughout the UK, rather than just in England.

Instead, we are stepping into a scenario where cuts are being made in a blanket way, without any obvious thought. The science budget being cut by 25%, where the research shows this relatively small budget actually returns a profit to the UK taxpayer over the long term, by increases in productivity.

I am all for smartly reducing spending, but we seem to be going about things like a small budget horror movie. Slash, slash, slash but little plot line and no thought.

I was very disappointed in the elections. There was no cogent discussion of what Britain should do, as a society, and what areas we can abandon. It was all BS, to be frank.

Doctor's salaries should be reduced by 25%; this would bring them in line with most of Western Europe. Blair bribed the medics with an insanely generous contract which massively increased their pay and reduced their working hours. The result: no GP services at weekends and out of hours. A similar deal was struck with dentists. The trouble is that the Tories are reluctant to antagonise medics as these are natural Conservative voters.

marklv

grubby23 wrote: »

The only difference is that the housewife can't steal from other people, and this is exactly what the socialists did: Borrowing and printing money, thereby running a high inflation which basically means the money we have is soon nothing worth it.

You need to learn about economics before opening your mouth. Inflation was much lower under Labour than it is now, despite the Tories mucking about with inflation measurements by using CPI instead of the long accepted RPI.

julieq

marklv wrote: »

You need to learn about economics before opening your mouth. Inflation was much lower under Labour than it is now, despite the Tories mucking about with inflation measurements by using CPI instead of the long accepted RPI.

That has got to be the most insanely stupid comment I have ever seen from a Labour supporter, although there's a rich harvest in your other contributions,

This government hasn't had the chance to put inflation up yet. It's attempting to deal with a deficit which is way out of control, and guess who set that up? Or did your lot do nothing since 1997 (when they inherited extremely strong fundamentals and chucked them down the toilet)?

If you believe we can sustain public spending at a level of something north of 150 billion more than tax receipts on the base of "investing" in a public sector which is laughably inefficient and unproductive then why not start forming a queue to pay higher taxes so we can actually afford them? What's the return on the investment exactly? We don't get growth from the public sector, we get bloat.