Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wye Aye!


I am so annoyed that I cannot blog my main notebook entry for today. It would be unfair an libellous to report the thoughts that popped into my head this morning. You will never know.

This diagram of public spending has made me think of correspondences in my own life. When I try to clean up my hard drive (as I have just done) it is always the large files I look for first. Trouble is that most of these large files are absolutely necessary (paging and hibernation files for example) and completely ring fenced. There is much ranting amongst the readers of certain newspapers regarding the terrible benefit culture that exists in this country but looking at the Spending by the Work and Pensions department it is the State Pension that costs the most. Now I am sure that there are some extreme libertarians who would knock out the entire W&P department (though obviously such people would delete everything except defence and possibly education) preferring to suggest that everyone should make arrangements for their own retirement/redundancy/other misfortunes). Of course a wet liberal like me might choose other things. The problem is, you cannot remove entire large scale department spending, instead you have to have to painstakingly go through all spending and make small adjustments which add up to the reduction you want. The analogy of course fails when you realise that any amount of public spending will be accompanied by some pain while pernickety deletion of lots of small files only has a cost in terms of the time it takes you to do it.

What I have also spotted about the diagram is the lovely bit of self-reference in that the Treasury "spends" almost as much money as the NHS - most of it covering "the bail out" (which of course I have to bite my tongue to support). Money as usual costs money and as far as I can see is simply a "Red Queen" effect. But then again what do I know?

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