The cuts are coming

[newwave]

The Con-Dem cuts are nearly here AIBU to hope that those who voted Tory get hit the hardest and lose the most.

I will admit to voting LD but i never expected some of them to be such a bunch of snide gits, as for Danny Alexander I want to stamp on his smug sneering face

" 1/2 million jobs is not the way to go to inspire confidence in the UK economy, get people to spend and revive the retail sector and give investors confidence in the UK. "

We're paying the price for Thatcher and Brown both being economic morons.

If you give a Frenchman a pound of tax money, he has dinner in a French restaurant where he eats French meant and drinks French wine, then drives home (a little unsteadily) in his new Renault to plan a holiday on the French med coast. So you can stimulate the French economy pretty easily.

Stimulating the UK retail sector is much less effective, because most of the money flows straight out of the country to buy the stuff people are buying. Cars, holidays, better food: all the things people buy when they feel good, all of it money lost to the economy (and as dollars, too). Thatcher smashed manufacturing (bad idea) in order to de-fang the unions (let's not go there). Brown sucked the City of London's dick with the fervour of a man who took ten years to get a second-rate political history PhD but was able to give the impression of economic competence so long as he swallowed hard enough.

Solving the problem of Thatcher's hatred for the working class and Brown's love affair with international capital is going to be hard. Osbourne isn't the man for it. But Alan Johnson and Miliband Minor, FFS.

"If you dont have service jobs then poeple will suffer. Those jobs arent there to make a 'profit'. They are there to ensure the smooth running of the country."

Trace me the path from an inclusion officer to foreign exchange.

I thought the OP said 'The cunts are coming'!

Same thing I guess.

"Sounds like we needa decent manufacturing base tokyo"

We do indeed. Let's look at Labour's contribution to that, 1997-2010. Someone find me a microscope.

"They help the school source equipment and grants in order to educate that young person."

Why does the school need help to do that? Are you saying that without inclusion officers it would be impossible for children with disabilities to be educated in mainstream schools?

The public sector is too big and unsustainable so I think we should look at these cuts as a way of rebalancing the econmy and making it more sustainable

Lol at Yuno and others 'the cunts are coming' - that has made my day.

Manufacturing in this country is dead - I have worked in manufacturing these past 16 years. Aparts from a few niche industries (and these are dwindling) this country makes barely anything. Most of it is outsourced, or in the process of being outsourced, to low cost economies. I know because that has been my job (procurement resourcing) for the past 4 years.

Quite. The example of inclusion officers is a classic demonstration. You create a system that, although immensely bureaucratic, still fails some people. You therefore appoint yet more people to navigate the system that you established in the first place, rather than fix the underlying system. Your funding system doesn't support people appropriately, so you create another layer of additional funding (grants) with its own bureaucracy to allocate them, which the inclusion officers then liaise with.

From the perspective of individual recipients this looks sensible: "my inclusion officer got my son his grant". But it's the economic equivalent of trying to make a piece of metal smooth by adding another layer of paint: it's always going to be rough, and it's getting thicker all the time. Labour governments like complex systems of funding which require multiple levels of advisors to navigate: it creates a client state, and makes recipients feel the government is looking after them. The arch example is why people in poverty are funded both through the tax system (tax credits) and the benefit system, which are entirely separate government departments, with separate assessment, payment, enforcement, audit, HR, etc, etc.

School admission is too complex: don't fix it, provide people to help parents navigate the system. Hospital administration doesn't work, don't fix it: provide patient advocates. And so on. Why do you think schools want to get out of LA control?

"however I do see also of Brown bashing, he took over BLAIR, who left him with a financial disaster!"

Blair's only responsible by omission, in that he left the economy to a man totally incapable of managing it. Brown was gifted benign economic times by the Tories and no-one noticed what a shocking job he was doing because times were good. Blair should have sacked Brown on the 2nd of May 1997, and for that he deserves blame. But the failure was Brown's.

"a man who was excellent chancellor and not a prime minister."

The latter part's true, certainly.

police sevice cuts tho...

Cap on benefits (excluding disability and pension) to average family income. The transition arrangements will be interesting to see.

whats the average family income which the universal benefit is set to become then??

for DD.....no word on EMA yet??

To qualify for WTC each person in a couple will have to work 24 hours a week ... rather than 16, is what I heard.

I wonder if that will also be the case for childcare element of working tax credits?

So families with a SAHM can't claim if the husband works normal hours?

I work 22.5 hours and my husband works around 30. Will we lose WTC? If so, we are royally screwed!