Having seen news of the protests today against public spending cuts, I am left wondering where those protesting were proposing that the money would come from. The country has been left financially on its knees by years of wasteful spending and poor economic management not helped by various bailouts for the banking and housing sectors.
Zoë quipped that it was nice to see 250,000 people offering to pay higher taxes to pay for services. Of course, the reality is that I suspect that an awful lot (if not all?) of those people want public spending cuts to be cancelled but don’t want to actually pay anything extra for this. That then brings us around to how these people think things are going to get paid for. We cannot as a nation borrow more – that has already got us into this mess. To do so would be to fecklessly plunge the country into even more issues saving the problems up and multiplying them for the future when they would again need to be addressed. It really would be selfish and irresponsible to saddle future generations with ever increasing debt.
Discussing this in Zoë’s office today I likened the situation to like having to pay a debt run up by your parents or Grandparents without ever seeing any benefit for the money. How would any of those 250,000 people like to find that their parents spent a lifetime spending money recklessly, borrowing to buy flash cars, bling and go on expensive holidays on the understanding that their offspring would pick up the tab. That really isn’t fair at all. But it seems that some people (a lot of people) have no idea that there isn’t a huge pit of money from which cash can just continue to be shovelled out of. It has to come from taxes, plain and simple. The Labour years were years of covert buy now, pay later. Well, later just came.
I found it irritating to see Ed Milliband on the bandwagon denouncing all these cuts. That is somewhat rich coming from a man who was part of the government that caused all these problems through poor fiscal policy and actions. What a hypocrite jumping on this “no to spending cuts” band wagon when he is one of those directly responsible for the very problems causing the cuts.
This reminds me of the big left wing instigated riot twenty five years ago where they were protesting about a tax that only had to be paid where the democratically elected local government chose to levy it. Unfortunately there would appear to be a quarter of a million people unable to think logically, and on the whole a quarter of a million people who do nothing productive but sponge off of the productive in the name of bureaucracy.
It is a shame that the chancellor had not been a little more assertive while he had the chance and just abolished a few pointless taxes like national insurance to get rid of some more of the bureaucracy instead of just rearranging it.
There would be a lot less protesting if these people had real jobs that contributed to society as would be the case if the last government had not over taxed and expanded the public sector to such a huge extent at the expense of productive industry.
As you say, everyone is free to give all they have to the government to waste should they so desire.
Suzie x