Budget 2008: the real cost of taxation?

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Topic started by Martin T (mart2929)

I'm a food-loving, slim, walking, event-organising, low-tax-campaigning, pragmatically academic, internationally working, property investing, troubleshooting coffee-addict seeking friends and contacts. If you have suffered tax injustice that the system cannot solve, I'd like to hear from you.

A topic from News & Current Affairs: Political

mart2929Wed 12/03/08 14:20

For most consumers, the big news of today's budget will be rises in booze duty.

However, it should be a little more worrying than that. HM Treasury is still broadly in denial that recession is about to happen in the UK (let alone stagflation, which is more likely given the size of the UK public sector).

The link below goes to a 12-page report from the Taxpayers Alliance.

http://tpa.typepad.com/home/files/taxpayers_alliance_budget_2008_report.pdf

The headlines:

1. UK public spending is now 45% of GDP. This is after a sustained period of growth. This means that the government's share of a growing pie has itself grown, i.e. the UK is living beyond its means: it is pouring more resources than it generates into non-productive uses. We will all see the pain of this in higher taxes when economic growth starts to fall in 2008 Q3.

2. Section 1 graphs the unsustainability of UK public sector spending. The OECD average is consistent, meaning that OECD governments (averaged) are living within their means. This is what governments should do, i.e. live within their means, floating with the economy rather than trying to sink a hole in it (and hope no-body notices). Unfortunately, the UK public sector has effectively done what UK consumers have done: splurged on credit cards.

3. Section 2 surveys the dead cost of big government. Government costs us more than just the tax we pay. In short, the UK has sacrificed £12bn annualised growth in GDP because of its tax-and-spend-en-masse policy. The tables on PDF page 8 show how the numbers accumulate by year.

4. Section 2 also comments on variances between government forecasts and actual results. These are big variances and they arise from incompetence: pure and simple. A private sector accountant would lose his job for being so detached from reality. A public sector department, however, can deceive the public ad nauseum with no sanction.

5. Section 3 analyses the composition of the UK Civil Service. By not re-hiring retired civil servants, the government would reduce expenditure by £3.3bn per annum. As the US Government demonstrated during its one-day strike, virtually no services would suffer as a result of reduced headcount of bureaucrats. In the UK, I believe this saving would render the government's obsession of targets obsolete. It would mean that the remaining public sector bodies would be able to direct their existing resources towards the front-line rather than piss about with politicised numbers behind the scenes.

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