Number crunching cuts

Nicholas

Ha, so much for the fat owl who needs to be removed's "Mr 10%"!

What about it Bounder Brown? Come out from behind the sofa and justify that accusation now you fat freak.

Daniel

It is unhelpfully emotive to class shadow cabinet members as winners/losers before they get to their departments. This has got to be a collective effort with collective responsibility. Ministers with responsibility for departments with big cuts should wear those cuts with pride, not be demeaned as 'loosers'.

Liz Brown

I hope that the idea that Defence spending in favour of increases in the dept for Internatonal Development is a joke. As currently stands, the DfID chucks phenomenal sums of our money not only at useless causes and spendaholic despots but even more increasingly fraudulent and discredited carbon trading scheme and climate change fraud. As long as Cameron persists with this fantasy, I shall withold my Vote. I could just about tolerate his change of heart with regards to the Lisbon Con Treaty as gormless had signed us up to it (breaking HIS referendum pledge) but this is the nail in the coffin for me

mvl243

Liz dont withold your vote ,withold yor taxes(they are mostly illegal anyway)

Cuffleyburgers

I am quite sure that Cameron and Osborne are not stupid. Therefore they must be lying.

When are they going to stop lying and square with the British public?

Unless they do they do not deserve to win the election.

Only problem with that is that the others deserve even less - VERY awkward.

What a f'king disaster.

2trueblue

So now we know, darling needed young George to flesh it out for him?

Cameron should shut up for the while and make simple statements that can not be misconstrued, promise us a referendum on the EU item and get on with it. After all even Sarcozy now states that the EU needs Britain, yes they do, and not just our money.
Chatting to people like Stern is really crazy, especially now that the real truth about all those statistics and findings are being clarified.

denis cooper

I read in the first table:

"Total spending cuts under Labour's PBR plans - 10%"

But I also read that "Total spending" would be £752 billion for 2013-14, compared to £676 billion for 2009-10.

So there would be no "Total spending cuts"; "Total spending" would in fact rise by £76 billion, which is about 11%.

Therefore at the trend GDP growth rate of about 2.5% pa for 4 years, total government spending would remain at about the same fraction of GDP.

I can't say how quickly revenues would rise with that average growth rate, but would it be wrong to say that they wouldn't rise much more quickly than spending?

In which case, could the annual budget deficit really be halved over that period?

And when would the government start to actually BALANCE ITS BUDGET, rather than running a deficit year after year?

As if that's the most natural thing in the world, politicians apparently believing that the British government should be exempt from the rules which apply to businesses and most other organisations, not to mention households.

I say "politicians" in general, because as well as Labour ministers I haven't heard either Tory or Liberal Democrat politicians saying that the default position should be A BALANCED BUDGET, or to be on the safe side a small annual surplus, and that's what we should be aiming for, and their target would be to achieve it in X or Y years.

Naomi Muse

Good to see the figures, Fraser.

Would be good to cajole or shame the government into releasing details of all the contracts, onerous get out clauses, and other committments so that George and the other opposition parties could put real figures together on what projects they could cut, as well as the quangoes etc

Naomi Muse

Good to see the figures.

However, even these are not as real as they need to be.

The government needs to divulge the pile of contracts and commitments it has together with all the penalty clauses for early closure for the figures to be truly real and for George and others to do their sums on what to cut.....

Pressure needed on the government to come clean...Go for it!

luke

How big are the cuts if osborne also reverses the NICs rise and cuts corporation tax as we are told he is planning?

andrew

if i understand your post, it is Labour plan 10% cuts, and Tories 17%. If i got that right, suddenly i don't feel so utterly hopeless?! either one of those numbers are a good start, no?

denis cooper

In fact neither party plans any cuts at all in total government expenditure; Labour plans to increase it by 11%, the Tories possibly by a smaller percentage.

Liberty

We are entering a period of worklessness and deflation. The exponential development of technology has reached the point where productivity will accelerate well beyond population increase and needs. Robots, automation and new vastly more powerful products will reduce the need for workers while maintaining economic growth. All economic activity will be digitized over the next twenty years and reduced enormously in cost. We have seen the beginnings of this process already.
Media is rapidly moving online. News and music producers find it difficult to charge for their goods. People spend very much less for news or music. We have seen a flurry of digital book readers one of which will have 1 million books ready installed. As the technology improves it will inevitably replace paper books and magazines taking most book shops out of the economy. Tescos have opend the first shop with fully automated check-outs. Online business is established but accelerating. Even government business could be automated now if it was simplified. In a few years films and TV will be accessed primarily via the web at hugely reduced cost. Manufacturing is now concentrated in fewer and fewer nations and will soon be totally automated making wage levels irrelevant. Even Chinese manufacturing employment peaked some years ago. Some goods are entirely digitized such as satnavs being a free app with smart phones but this is just the beginning.
The next big thing will be robots. Over the next 20 years robots will progressively be able to do virtually anything a human can do. Massive firms are gearing up now to produce robots for thousands of carrying, monitoring, cleaning jobs in hospitals, factories, farms, offices and homes over the next few years. Their brains are AI, AI is IT and IT is doubling in power per £ every year with no limit in sight. A robot brain will soon have thousands of times more power per m3 than a human brain, be able to do anything we can do and be mass produced in automated factories by other robots at low cost.
We have huge numbers of people in the UK economically inactive already, in most of Europe and the USA there are even more. This is causing serious anxiety because our mindset is still that all who are able should work and we have such massive debts. But simple jobs are disappearing and this process will move up the food chain rapidly leaving a few scientists and engineers at the apex, others producing content for specialist requirements but most will not work at all unless they want to. But there will be quite enough wealth for all even if it is created by robots and automated systems and not work. Most of those now out of work will never work again.
There could be social disorder, governments will panic, we will still need industry to be located here but when we realise that few will work in it, the goods cost very little and all a government needs to ensure are the essentials, tools, sport, art, culture, toys and security to keep us happy it will be fine.
Some governments are seeing their power slip away and are grabbing what they can while they can. The internet undermines governments. But the forces of technological evolution, economics and the anarchy, freedom and costlessness of the internet cannot be contained. In 30 years the need to work will have disappeared and probably governments too yet we will have everything we want, including permanenat good health and beauty.

PAUL GILBOY

Everyone who works for the state knew there was large reductions of staff going on under labour. Even labour are not stupid enough to not smell the coffee.
Once the tories realised what was happening especially in light of not having the figures, they held off from grandstanding.