The 81 billionth cut is the deepest

[glenatron]

Here is a point to ponder with regard to the fairness agenda our Condem masters are pushing forward.

Supposing we went out among the great British public and totally at random selected someone and asked if they were a millionaire. The odds of them being one would be 0.005% approximately.

Now let us imagine you went to Westminster, visited the Cabinet and totally at random selected someone and asked if they were a millionaire. The odds of them being one would be slightly over 79%.

I'm not saying there is anything right or wrong about this- you can't get into power without being rich, after all- there is a cost involved in buying votes and if you want a capitalist democracy you have to live with that. But they can't really say they understand the pain that their cuts will inflict on the poorest, or on the swathes of middle class public sector employees who will also get the chop.

When they talk about the cuts and George Osborne ( a man with an uncanny resemblance to the bastard offspring of Peter Mandelson and Noddy ) tells us that those with the broadest shoulders will bear the greatest burden, I can't help but feel he has an image in his head of broad shouldered peasants toiling in the fields. Given that those who will bear the greatest burden by far will be women, I think he's probably got a rather funny idea of gender physiology too.

I have a pretty bad feeling about these cuts, but no rational basis for it. I don't doubt that cuts were needed, because a bunch of shortsighted halfwits over the preceding twenty years couldn't see that a deregulated financial sector would not result in great fiscal responsibility, but the difference between surgery and butchery is largely a matter of where and how cuts are performed and the outcomes are noticeably different.

Edit:
Two articles that indicate how this week have made Cameron a liar:
On the Defence review
On the cuts - the latter of these is the most insightful discussion of the announcement I've seen so far and makes me feel pretty justified in having a bad feeling about them.

Comments

[bunting.livejournal.com]

It'll take about 12 months before the impact of these cuts kicks in. The major worry I have is not the actually cuts, but how they all link together.

I'm glad that you mentioned the last 20 years, as in reality regulation of the financial sector should have started prior to the previous government.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

It really will be a long wait, the latter article I've edited above suggests they are a recipe for a depression, so that's nice!

[bunting.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link, very informative.

[spoon-doom.livejournal.com]

Clearly the conservatives are just plain evil and anyone who voted for them without themselves being a millionaire has been conned.
But I don't think things will improve in the forseeable future, as most of the Internet seems to be a right-wing echo-chamber as anyones who has ever looked at have your say on bbc news knows.
I rather suspect that if this alternate vote referendum does materialise the public will vote against it anyway.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

It does seem that way. I mean, one of the theoretical elements of conservatism as an ideology is that it is about conserving things that are good. There seem to be a lot of things that are good, traditional and patriotic ( for example, the BBC ) that the conservatives seem determined to kill off to favour their mates. George Osborne wrote off a 6bn tax bill owed by Vodaphone recently. That would have been a fair few worthwhile projects that could have been maintained. They seem to have developed increasingly in to the UK branch of the Republicans lately.

The trouble I see is the complete lack of a meaningful alternative. And the fact that people ( myself included ) tend to vote dogmatically rather than voting for ideas so even if there was a meaningful alternative they might not get the votes they needed.

[thewhitespider.livejournal.com]

Not *entirely* fair - there are plenty of bits of the internet that are left wing echo chambers too.

[thewhitespider.livejournal.com]

On the upside, both of those articles were written by people with considerablee agendas of their own. I try to avoid reading anything by Page these days - whenever he writes about anything I know about, he twists the truth enough that whenever he writes about something I don't know about I assume he's doing it then too.

Hari's article felt a bit disingenious to me too - he starts out lambasting the government for failing to realise that a government can't base it's spending priorities on the same things an individual should, but by the end of the article he's treating tax revenue as entirely fungible and suggesting that we should be taking 6Bn from the banking sector, not the welfare state. I suspect, treasury economists not being complete morons, that they have considered that possibility and concluded that it's not quite as simple as that...

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not sure, that 6bn that they wrote off from Vodafone ( I think it was them anyways ) seemed like a really flippin' odd thing to do.

[littlesnowy.livejournal.com]

It sounds intriguing, there's a fair chance vodafone had come up with some scheme where they could postpone paying it forever and not pay anything in the meantime. I've not got a very rosy view of the ability to extract money from mega corps.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

For "less than 6bn" you can probably hire some pretty handy lawyers and accountants for quite a long time.

[ramalam.livejournal.com]

I shudder as well when Osbourne predicts that the people who will lose jobs will be 'picked up' by the Private sector. Now, all I have learnt about increased privitisation is that it tends to make things worse rather than better (by 'worse' I mean the service received, not worse profits for those in charge of the companies).

Sometimes I wish I knew more about economics so I could really judge the cuts.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

He is assuming that in a time of financial ruin and decline we will suddenly have the biggest period of private sector growth in british history. As the second link above observes, this approach has never worked before.

I used to think it would be good to know more about economics. Now I think it's study belongs in comparative religion rather than anywhere near the sciences.