'If you were chancellor, what'd you cut?' poll discussion

JDPower

MSE_Martin wrote: »

Today we have the government spending review. The issues of taxes is not what is being discussed - the poll reflects this.

And the bank levy?

katmcleod

I said Defence. Who do we need defending from? Surely that can be cut, we don't have anyone about to send fleets of warships over to attack us, it can wait a while.

I was quite shocked how many people said overseas aid. We might think we have it hard but think how many kids die because they have no water? We need to keep helping those less fortunate. They need it more than we do. Pay it forward and all that

SoFarSoGood_3

I notice that there is no mention of cutting Social Services, particularly the number of social workers. Why not?

I would abandon the whole clumsey, expensive, ineffectual, mismanaged, dubious department.

With the resulting, massive savings, I would redistribute the vital jobs between a significantly increased number of health visitors and a new, specialist police department. Both well financed, working co-operatively and very accountable!

Felixity

How about another poll about who would you tax?

There's too much emphasis on the deficit being fixed by cuts. Why isn't there more discussion about taxes? I'd rather my taxes were bumped up a little than things like my mother's pension increases and winter fuel allowance severely cut. I'd also rather pay a bit more out than have thousands more people on benefits because of cuts in public expenditure (and to have low paid people in the public sector being asked to pay more for their pensions. Low pay in the public sector is meant to be countered by the fact that the pensions are decent...I could go on about that but won't). I know there have to be cuts, but if we really want to be a "fair" society (whatever "fair" actually means when politicians use that word) I think that there should be a more balanced 'cut expenditure AND raise money from taxes' approach.

CUTS: I guess
Trident
Review health screening programmes and, where benefits are slight, extend the time period between screenings
Cut the money paid to consultancy firms in central and local government (eg KPMG, etc)
Abandon a major IT programme or two - they never seem to work anyway and the costs always go up exponentionally compared to the initial budget
Review local authority and central government departmental structures, if there's more than 6 layers from the lowest minion to the Chief Exec level, cut out a layer of management ...or maybe two layers...
Reduce the mileage allowance paid to staff in central / local government to encourage greater use of teleconferencing / fewer meetings / fewer free lunches / less wasted time travelling / fewer pointless meetings
etc...
Cut the number of hours expensive & senior people spend doing their own admin and get them some cheaper admin support so we get the most out of our more highly paid people in the public sector (I'm guessing this might be an issue in some places)

Felixity

Interesting point about social workers. Many social workers and social care staff work for large charities on contracts that have been outsourced to them by local authorities. I say "charities" but some of these are organisations with turnovers of £100-200m - income mostly from local / central government. This worries me, for a whole host of reasons!

blueocto

I agree with the 2 popular points of Overseas Aid and Social Benefits.

Overseas Aid - my dad whom is now 64, can remember them asking people back when he was young, for their money every month for these starving countries et al.
Thats over 40 years - yet no improvement? surely anyone with half a brain cell would not give someone £15 a month for 40 year and not see any improvement - continue to do so! Its not viable. How often do we see our government investing £7bn a year in our homeless, disabled, aged, cancer research, rspca...?

Social Security Benefits needs a whole new overhaul - if we could separate the truly needy from the wasters so easily, it would have happened already. They should be asking those who already work in the job, where improvements should be made. After working 6 years for HMRC that was enough for me and their backwards thinking. They dont like forward, progressive thinkers with a mond of their own :wall:

The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, its only a matter of time before the tish hits the fan!

Eco_Miser

I voted for no cuts. I didn't really mean no cuts, but I don't believe in picking a sector and saying, 'Let's cut this'.
Rather I would want to cut out waste, so we get the same, or better, results with less cost, across the whole of the public sector.
For example by centralised buying, by reducing waste, by reducing bureaucracy, by reversing the outsourcing where the same people do the same jobs but now they're employed by a private contractor, who of course has to make a profit, while the public body that used to employ them, and still pays for them, only had to break even.

Eco_Miser

bsuije wrote: »

But then on the bus, I see a 'mildly' disabled person (I mean that she could interact normally and could be doing some job) getting on at the stop of a big shopping place, with three or four bags in the middle of a weekday and then brag on about her new touch-screen computer which, '...wasn't that expensive - around £600.' What!!!

How do you know she doesn't have a job, and is doing her shopping on her day off?
Or perhaps those those or four bags of shopping are the weekly provisions for the group home she lives in, and helps run.

DKLS

Cut trident, all we need to do is knock up some fibreglass tridents at a cost of 10k max, stick them on the back of army trucks and parade them in front of the press to show the world our "military might", Worked for Saddam

sharrison01

As a different perspective to putting extra taxes on banking which is the sector, if history is anything to go by, that will generate lots of money in the future, how about putting a levy on fast food chains, confectionary and tobacco companies? All of these sectors have shown strong growth over the past few years due to people downgrading their diets to save money and smoking more due to stress yet they will incur huge costs to the NHS and society in the future. Energy companies have also boomed, in part due to increasing oil prices yet this hits every sector of the economy with food costs going up, delivery costs pushing high street prices up and manufacturing costs going up, to name but a few examples.

The bank levy is a political ploy to get votes from the average tabloid reader that has been sold a scapegoat. To discriminate against a specific sector that history shows to be positive for the economy and the country as a whole is both short-sighted and dangerous given the UK's reliance on international investment into the banking sector.