AIBU to wonder what on earth the government is doing with our money?

[Lapland123]

So we have higher taxes than ever

yet we have all public services at an all time low, with everyone involved striking due to poor pay, which is causing a vicious circle in terms of recruitment of new staff and retention of existing staff

Teachers, firefighters, criminal law barristers, doctors, nurses, university staff etc all striking

What on earth has the government done with all the money we give them?

Aside from the blatant theft such as the PPE scandal, how are they draining the taxpayers money?

Because the one thing we are sure is that it isn’t reaching the workers delivering public services we all need.

This is what I'd like to know. One thing is Liz Truss PM pension of over £120k pa index linked for life after 44 days in office and causing carnage.

Yes I mean that’s a drop in the ocean of what we give them, but it’s an absolute outrage that she gets this

Lining their and their cronies' pockets of course!

Dido Harding, Michelle Mone etc etc etc

Rwanda.

Bozo's legal defence bill

Paying off the people Priti Patel bullied

Inquiry after inquiry after inquiry into their incompetence to make it look like they're doing something

Trying to break international law has got to be pretty expensive, no?

I could go on but you get the idea 🙄

Fucking Brexit. That's got to be top of the list

I would like to see a report that broke down what they spend on different sectors. And maybe even some options for the future. I said this before on here and someone asked if I was joking... I'm a bit confused whether the joke was it existing and me not knowing, or that they'd ever produce such a thing,!

Yes some sort of accountability should be in order, given what we pay them

Giving contracts to 3rd party organisations to provide services that should be provided in house by public services (and always used to be). So many fingers in the pies and most of them belong to Tories making vast sums of money.
I can't see how it can be more efficient and cost effective to have 3 or 4 layers of contracts for something that used to be funded directly - I'm talking about NHS and DWP being 2 examples I know about.

Paying a lot of people not to work for two covid years cost quite a lot. It needs repaying.

Allowing large companies to pay little tax so personal taxation remains high. Not increasing fuel duty in line with inflation has cost £80bn in lost revenue, so money has to be found somewhere. Same with not pursuing Covid fraud.

giving it all all thier wealthy friends and donors

Yeah this idea that the private sector is always best, is always efficient, is discredited. The profit motive alone extracts a certain level of value never mind the monopolistic inefficiencies, cronyism and sheer incompetence.

We've had decades of the private sector making things more expensive, more complex, more wasteful, delivering worse outcomes and worse value for the taxpayer. Look at the agency nurse situation for a glaring example.

We need to get away from the notion that public sector is inefficient and not innovative. Put enough investment into it, attract the best minds into it, and you can build things that genuinely impact people and society for the better. You build the economies of the future, environments where private investment follows.

We've seen none of that. All we've built in recent decades are profit-siphoning exercises, wringing dry the people, the families and communities they're apparently designed in the interests of. It needs to change.

Only the little people like us have to pay tax - most of the seriously wealthy dodge some or all of it.
Then there's the multinationals who don't pay tax here.
The non-doms.
and then the amounts given to Tory mates and their various schemes and scams.i
The lower rates of tax if you have piles of wealth (dividends, capital gains), rather than being a wage slave.
no wonder there's no left for stuff that actually matters.

I wonder if anyone remembers the 2010 election when the Tories campaigned on this very issue saying "you've paid the tax so where are the improvements?" My guess is they won't use that again this time

power corrupts
those in power make the rules and they make them to benefit themselves and those with whom it is in thier interests to curry favour
the longer they stay in power the worse they get
to them we are just livestock to be milked for profit

A lot gets given to the private companies in control of our resources so that they can give it to rich shareholders, some of which are their friends and families and some of which are other rich foreigners that they’ve sold us out to. While those companies make us pay a fortune for our own resources in our own lands, which money similarly goes to shareholders.

Privatization. Private profit, public debt, public sewage dumps and private superyachts.

The lower rates of tax if you have piles of wealth (dividends, capital gains), rather than being a wage slave
only fools and horses work....we are the fools & horses, the wealthy live high on the hog while we do the real work

Government should be made to publish an annual report showing progress against elected manifesto together with expenditure. Haha 😆as if. Imagine the panic.

Have a look.

www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/press-release/government-manifesto-pledges

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/

This. The people that wanted harder and faster lockdowns (including Labour) forget that would only have made us deeper in the shit financially.

I get so angry at the cost of lockdowns

Subsidising working peoples wages because wages are so shockingly low -because apparently we love letting big conglomerates know we welcome them, their tax dodging and we have a cheap workforce they can exploit!

This! Furlough is definitely up there.

Also subsidising private landlords via housing benefit, instead of subsidising council housing that remained in public ownership.

Honestly, I do the opposite - I wonder where the money actually comes from to pay for all the stuff.

I earn an average salary and pay a fairly modest amount in tax and NI. Over the course of my life I might pay for myself, as long as I don't get cancer or something expensive to treat, or on the other hand live long enough to soak up 40 years of pension (unlikely).

But I know lots of people (friends and work clients) who, due to totally valid circumstances, pay barely any tax. They survive on meager benefits, but the actual cost is high because of housing costs, legal aid, you name it. There are lots more of these households than there are really high earners, so I don't understand how it balances.

I'm from Ireland and I must say I'm even more mystified how they make it work.

Meh. Harder and faster lockdowns are shorter and get the economy moving quicker and cost less. It's why those countries that did better at controlling the virus generally did better economically.

There is an economic cost to the long term health effects of covid and having 5 covid waves a year. However I suspect a lot of our money is just sitting in the offshore accounts of friends of the Tory party. Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands seem like a good bet.

Apparently 40% of the working population takes more (in various benefits) than they put into the system (info from another thread here in Mumsnet, I have not personally verified it). So that says a lot....also: years of furlough payments to a lot of people, wasting resources i.e. hiring agency nurses that cost triple what a nurse employed by the NHS would cost, creating apps for the COVID fiasco, PPE for COVID, millions of tests, I mean I can only imagine the COVID thing alone has cost billions to the taxpayer....