Obnoxio's Manifesto

OTC makes the sensible case for scrapping large chunks of the quangocracy; buried away in the comments is his fuller manifesto, which is pretty much the same as my own:
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First step would be to leave the EU.

Second step would be to repeal every law based on EU directives. We can always re-implement later. Mass repeal of every law introduced by Labour since 1997. (Probably a lot of overlap!)

Third step would be to shit-can every consultancy contract with the government and renegotiate.

Every single drop of government funding for quangoes and charities stopped dead.

Massive tax simplification: flat tax of 25% on everything above £12,000 per annum. Dividends untaxed. Corporate tax abolished*. All duties abolished**. VAT abolished. National Insurance either abolished or replace the current Ponzi scheme with actual insurance.

Sell off the NHS.

Renationalise the trains and resell them in such a way that you don't have oligopolies on routes. Same thing for buses.

Deregulate schools and introduce vouchers.

Introduce citizens income, end ALL welfare programs. Implement program to gradually phase out citizen's income***.

Sack the entire civil service, district and town councils. Review the entire governance requirement.

Go to the market to get us out of the bank ownership business.
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* I'd quibble with this. It would be far better to have a 20% flat tax on all income, personal or corporate, than 25% on personal incomes and 0% on corporate.

** 'Duties' that equate to user charges, such as fuel duties to pay for roads; a modest tax of a few percent on new goods to cover refuse collection costs; or indeed taxes on land values seem like 'good' taxes to me.

*** I'm not sure where this is going. A higher effective income tax-free personal allowance is an important corollary of a Citizen's Income-style welfare system; as nobody can be sure which is preferable, why not give people a choice?

"GPs paid more for working less"

This is hardly news, is it?

Average GP Partners salaries are now £114,000 a year, as against £56,000 in 2001. Adjust that for the fact the average working week is now 36.3 hours, not 43.1, that's equivalent to a payrise of 130%.

The generic headline "Government allows taxpayer to get conned out of billions by rent-seeking monopoly for umpteenth time" would cover it.

"Smoking costs the NHS billions"

The bansturbators are at it again.

FFS, the NHS is a taxpayer funded public body. So what they are really saying is "Smoking costs the taxpayer billions". If that figure of £2.7 billion for the 'cost' of treating smoking-related illnesses is correct*, let's compare it with the taxes that smokers pay;

1. Let's kick off with £9 billion tobacco duties, stick on £1.5 billion for the VAT on top, makes £10.5 billion.

2. We pay for smoking out of our net income, taxable at around 30%, so before we can buy our smokes, we've paid another £4.5 billion in income tax/National Insurance.

3. Add to this the fact that smokers live ten years less than non-smokers, that reduces the number of pensioners by a 15 per cent or so, reducing the cost to the taxpayer by a further £12 billion odd.

Tot that lot up, and you'll find that smokers save other taxpayers about £27 billion per annum. Is it too much to ask that ten per cent of that is spent on treatment?

The much quoted ASH are of course yet another quango - they received a cool £320,400 from the Dept of Health and The Wales Assembly Government (see page 15 of the 2007 accounts), which is more than half their income. And is probably included in the £2.7 billion figure.

* And doesn't get revised up by a factor of four, like they did with alcohol related NHS admissions.

NHS Fuckwittery (10)

Back in May, they came up with some Big Scary Numbers, claiming that 200,000 NHS admissions a year were alcohol-related.

Hmm. Not scary enough, obviously. So they've now revised that up to 800,000 admissions a year.

But despite this, they admit that only "£2billion of NHS money is spent every year treating patients with alcohol-related diseases", which is no higher than the guesstimate in my previous post, which is in turn only 2% of overall NHS cost and a small fraction of alcohol duty revenues. And it's not "NHS money" FFS, it's taxpayers' money.

The most outrageous claim is that "six per cent of all NHS admissions are in some way caused by drink". So what? Seeing as half of us are drunk for a couple of hours a day, I'd say this is pretty much par for the course.

NHS Fuckwittery (9)

Shock! Horror!

Under the heading "Hospital alcohol admissions soar" comes this factoid: Alcohol was the main or secondary cause of 207,800 NHS admissions in 2006/7, compared to 93,500 in 1995/96.

Let's crunch those numbers:
1. Total NHS admissions approx. 10 million per annum.
2. Total spending on NHS in 2006-07 = £82 billion.
3. £82 billion ÷ 10 million x 207,800 = £1.7 billion* (assuming that average cost of an 'alcohol related admission' is the same as the average cost of all admissions)
4. Total alcohol duties collected in 2006-07 = £8 billion (from Tab C4), plus 50% for VAT = £12 billion.

So I think this is the usual BBC-Nulab alliance softening us up for yet more bansturbation. Wouldn't a more appropriate headline have been something like "Nulab drives nation to drink"?

* The Institute of Alcohol Studies reported that the cost was £1.7 bn back in 2004 (see page 8 of this), so this looks about right. Yes, there is such an Institute! All I can say is, I have been studying the effects of alcohol very closely for over a quarter of a century, and I am still none the wiser, heck knows what sort of breakthrough they're hoping for.