Opposition debate on ringfencing Sure Start

[NicName]

I'm watching Opposition proposal debate that Sure Start should be ringfenced again from the Con Dem cuts:
news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_8167000/8167404.stm
It's truly shocking that councils are having to close such services.
Sure Start allows mums to work, affords children a good start in life & delivers great value for money in reducing benefits. All parties have conceded that. Clegg promised to protect Surestart from any cuts.
Think Cameron should really be apologising to women for the swingeing cuts to Sure Start & Foundation Years spending that are going to affect millions of mums and kids & their opportunities for years to come, rather than patronising any that point out uncomfortable truths to him.

"Corporation tax etc is more significant than income tax, as a general rule."

No, no it's not.

Here is the projected income for 2011-2012@
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/budget/8403115/Budget-2011-graphic-Spending-income-tax-shortfall.html

Income tax £158bn
National Insurance £101bn
VAT £100bn
Excise duties £46bn
Corporation tax £48bn
Business rates £25bn
Council tax £26bn
Other £85bn

Income tax alone far outstrips corporation tax. Then take into account NI and VAT, both of which are paid for by workers, and Corporation tax is even more insignificant in comparison.

As already said you cannot afford a European Social system on an American Taxation model.

Blaming the banks avoids the real issue, delays any real fix and lets the politicians responsible off of the hook.

"In times of prosperity and in times of hardship, we (ie Labour and the nation) spent money that we simply didn't have"

The Tories did exactly the same when they were in power. Blaming Labour for this mess is the Tory equivalent of blaming the banks.

"The banks arguably should have been allowed to go under rather than being bailed out but bailing them out isn?t what has bankrupted us."

If they had gone under the economy would be in an even bigger hole that it is now. Plus there would be no one to lend the Government the money that it needs to fund it's spending.

And that's the irony of Labour blaming the "evil" banks. Continued overspending and credit has put the Government even deeper into the pockets of the banks than it ever has been before and has made the banks a tidy and predictable profit. If the banks were genuinely "evil" surely the only moral thing to do would be to stop borrowing from them?

"showing parents how to play with their kids.......the government spent money on that??? seriously?"

Sometimes its needed. There are a minority of parents who don't have basic parenting skills because they weren't parented properly themselves. I worked for a while on a pilot project to provide 2 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds with 10 hours a week free pre-schooling. Alot of the parents using that project had seriously issues (addiction, disability, abusive partners etc etc) and were pretty inarticulate & illiterate. In addition to providing the ten hours at pre-school we also helped to arrange one-to-one help for those parents via staff at children's centres etc. In so far as any one childrens' center works with parents like that to break the cycle of poor parenting its doing a great job and saving the tax-payer a fortune in the long run.