40 percent cuts you cannot be serious

Labour appear to be jumping on every story at the moment.

I personally I don't like these cuts but I do understand that they are not going to be 40percent. This is an exercise to find out where cuts can be made and while doing this departments may find cuts they didn't realise they could make. This could give them more options. Some departs will be making say 10% cuts while others 30%.

It seems to me that Labour appear to oppose every cut. However they claimed to of made plans for billions of cuts. Surely some of these cuts would of been simular to the current governments.

SmithNN8 Tweeted to me yesterday that 'Borrowing is just deferred taxation'. Thats just it, how long can you go on before the interest rates become too high or recovery is not as strong as hoped. How long can you wait until you make the cuts and if you wait too long could cuts be worse or tax higher?


I think Labour needs to improve its opposition so that it does not oppose everything otherwise voters won't take them seriously.

Todays link is to the Jack of Kent Blog who asks questions about the image of skepticism 

Lib Dems Become More Realistic

Nick Clegg today outlined the Liberal Democrat four priorities called 'Four steps to a Fairer Britain' which are ;

1.Fair taxes.

2. A new, fair start for all children at school.

3. A rebalanced, green economy.

4. And clean, open politics.

Nick Cleggs speech can be read here

My blog is not about this speech however its about the fact that he has delayed some of the key policies as they are too expensive and that no party is telly the truth when it comes to the required spending cuts to reduce the countries deficit.

The policies being removed from the manifesto are; extending free childcare, free personal care for the elderly, "citizen's pension" and delaying introducing free tuition fees too six years (It will now be rolled out over these 6 years - starting with final year students).

I actually agree with this as the Lib Dems do need to be more realistic on how much we can afford to spend. I also think that the Lib Dem activists should be more realistic about what is possible and therefore I agree with Nick Clegg and not with the probable back lash from Lib Dems. After all these policies have not been forgotten and will be added later when they can be afforded. But for the moment are removed so as not to cause any of the usual confusion.

I also think that the whole tax credit systems costs way too much in administration for both the government and the people requesting tax credits. Having a higher tax starting rate of £10,000 (as the Lib Dems propose) would be more simple and would infact cut administration costs.

I would also point out that no party, (Even the Conservatives) are being realistic on what we need to do to pay back Britains debt, which is why I was pleased to see that the Lib Dems are now moving in this direction.

Labour and the Tories have been going at great guns at each other recently over each partys funding gap in their policies. The holes the media and the parties have found in each others policies is all the proof you need that both parties plans do not go far enough. The parites are making promises they can't keep. This is why I'm please too see the Lib Dems getting real on their policies. Now all Parties and us (the public) need to get realistic on spending cuts.

Whats scary about this is, one of these parites will be in power this year and their plans don't appear to be ready to handle this counties money problems.

Of course we are not the only country which a deficit problem see Bracknell Blog World Debt Crisis.

World Debt Crisis

There is rightly a lot of focus on the UK’s national budget deficit which is on course to be a record £178 billion in the current financial. This is after Greece passed it "austerity" budget and the Republic of Ireland passed its serve budget cuts to keep them within the European 13% GDP borrowing rule.

The UK debt is rising at an alarming rate too and all the parties appear to have differing plans to deal with it (or not), before any downgrading of the UK's credit rating. I’m not sure any political party really has the whole solution or are in fact telling the public the full facts on what they will really do to get the UK back on track.

The UK of course is not the only economy with a large deficit. I have also noticed that so many of the world’s economies are in trouble.

Is the world sinking under a growing national debt or can the economic recovery turn it around before the taxes put us all back into recession? Its certainly a fine line between keeping the deficit down and reducing capital spending (spending which maybe helping the economic recovery).

The above chart can be found here from www.visualeconomics.com.

A great source of comparison between countries can be found at the CIA public library here.

UPDATE: the Conservative blog has details that could be showing that the UK is now borrowing at a rate of 17% of GDP see here .