Your Money and How They Spend It

vivatifosi

Just started, BBC2, looks interesting.

vivatifosi

7 big budgets totalling £692bn pa spend.

Transport
Law and Order
Defence
Debt interest bigger than all of the above, then the biggest:

Av spend works out at:
Education £2,800 per family
Health £3,800 per family
Social security £6,000 per family

The number of over 85 year-olds is set to double over 25 years to 3m.

In 50 years time we'll spend double the defence budget extra, just to cope with aging population.

vivatifosi

Since NHS started in 1948, the cost of running it in today's prices has increased 11-fold.

Closing hospitals would save money and they would be run more effectively, but its a sacred cow.

vivatifosi

The nice to haves: culture and art.

Art spending £447m pa (England)

But more than that was spend on 8 fire control centres that will never work and which we have to pay for, for the next 8 years: £469m down the pan.

Typhoon Jet: £3.5bn over budget.
NHS IT system: £6bn cost, doesn't work.

Alistair Darling: we should have asked ourselves tougher questions about whether or not we needed to spend the money.

vivatifosi

Although governments spend more in % terms of GDP in a recession, spending has outstripped taxes for pretty much all of the last 50 years, irrespective of government.

In the late 1980s the Conservative govt thought that the money would always be there and took on more liabilities than they should have. By 1993 deficit was £50bn.

Then Labour did the same for the following recession "only in technicolour"

Two big revenue flows into the Treasury: North Sea Oil, followed by the banking sector.

Unlike North Sea Oil, the money from the banking sector doesn't stop flowing slowly.

PasturesNew

One way they could reduce the cost of elder-care is to have more sheltered housing. If you had a bunch of 50 of them living together in little bungalows, rather than being forced to stay in their own homes or inadequate homes, any carers could whip along and see 3-4x as many of them than they can see in the daft system now running where carers are driving round between each one and having to find parking spaces etc.

Waiting list round my way for sheltered is looking like 2-3 years or more for somebody nearly 90.

vivatifosi

I'm not as good at this as you Pastures. Just lost my net connection for about 15 minutes.

That was the bit where they talked about the Scots getting a higher spend than the English by about 19%, then the Scots telling the English that they bring North Sea Oil to the table.

That was followed by a look at Morpeth, where the colliery closed, the manufacturing jobs went, and now over 50% work in the public sector.

Finally it looked at infrastructure spend.

Nick Robinson said we need a more open debate on how our money is spent.

Next week: the trouble with tax, same time.

There's a tax and spend calculator on the BBC website where you can put in what you pay and what you get out, here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13633966



Part two next week.

OptionARMAGEDDON

currently circa -30k p.a. not a happy bunny.

vivatifosi

Big negative number here too Option. I must tell The White Horse that we're getting so little from taxes as a result of his job and my running my own company, that between us we could pay my gross salary at the library and still be over £10k down.

PasturesNew

There's a thread on that link on the forum on its own. It's completely cr4p. It only asks how much you earn. Not how much council tax you pay, or if you're ill, or which county you live in.... all contributory to what you pay out and take.

Mine is a positive number, I'm in the 2nd dectile. But I'm low maintenance.

kabayiri

I'm not sure I get the point of these programs.

So Politicians spend our money like it's going out of fashion. When was this ever different?

Big project spends go wrong and over budget we are told. Well, recent history shows we don't learn from our mistakes. The previous try at the NHS computerisation (Operational Research) cost £2bn+ in the early 90s and yielded just one hospital partially using it.

So why will things change?

Perhaps governments should be forced to consider budgeting more like households do. If I spend more than I bring in, I can't persuade the bank that my offspring will pick up the tab down the line. Perhaps politics is its own worst enemy, and we need mechanisms to protect us from this.