One third of people in employment in Newcastle are employed by the state..

[SixtyFootDoll]

How can we as a Country keep going if most of us are State employees?
Esp when the Councils start haveing to make cuts.

Bariatric - Not sure where you get your figures from: am pretty certain it's over 50% in both Scotland and N Ireland. Maybe your figs don't include NHS staff, or something. These employees provide all the services on which we depend.

where do you get your 50% from?

stats here

I just dont see how it can make economic sense to have so many people employed in th public sector.
We are working to pay our taxes to pay our wages to pay our taxes etc.

Good point fluffles. A lot of public sector employees are providing essential services.

Where i am in Swales we have a lot of people emloyed in the Stats and Patent offices, in return for our steel works closing down!

it makes sense if the public sector is supporting and servicing the population in an effective way. if the public are not educated, well etc the economy suffers. if the infrastructure is not well maintained the economy suffers etc etc etc.

public and private are not separate beasts they rely on each other.

Of course we need essential services, like haelth workers , Police,Education I my self am an employee of the state.
But 5 a day officers
WAlk to school co-ordinators?
Harldy necessary.
I have no political agenda btw, I jsut heard the statistic i quoted in my oP and it got me thinking thats all,

The whole model of capitalism doesn't make sense

Grow grow grow, make more, earn more to spend more.

Why is it all about growing? That makes less sense to me than the fact that 1/3 of people in Newcastle are employed in the public sector.

We have to accept one of two things, in a pure capitalist society there will never be 100% employment because 100% of the skills on offer are not required at any given time, so you have a choice either pay those not required to be civil servants that may or may not be seen as being essential or pay them in benefits at a reduced rate but where they will do nothing at all useful, pay very little in VAT because they will have less to spend and potentially they will turn to crime or the blackmarket to make ends meet.
I know which I prefer.

"We are working to pay our taxes to pay our wages to pay our taxes etc."

Ermm no.. we are working at whatever we are skilled at to pay taxes to buy the services of people with other skill we don't have.

If 5-a-day or walk-to-school schemes can reduce obesity and related health problems then these co-ordinators will pay for themselves easily.

One such co-ordinator probably costs about £20k in salary and office costs per year... so if they prevent one person from requiring type2 diabetes medication or a hospital stay per year then they can probably make their own salary.

[Obviously that kind of cause and effect evidence doesn't exist but that doesn't mean the thinking is flawed]

Bariatric - Many apologies, I've also found www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/01/15110509/2 on Scotland. I had completely misremembered quotes from articles and speeches on the higher rates of public sector employment (I'm Scottish so no axe to grind).

Public sector also includes - museums, art galleries, leisure centres, parks, forestry commission...

if all of these were private enterprises the admission charges would be much higher.

I think the debate as to why/where govt departments were relocated is missing the point. In an entirely unscientific survey of the jobs page in our local paper every week, at least half the ads are for local council or NHS vacancies. I for one am quite grateful for the council and NHS services that I access here, but given there is little or no manufacturing, industry, or really any other significant employment in the area, I am left wondering just how it is all paid for.

duffpancake it is paid for with future taxes they plan to take off our children, it always makes me laugh when people say I've paid my NI/tax for (insert which ever service they require) because the money we are paying now was spent 20 years ago, we've been robbing peter to pay paul since the NHS and social security systems were established, we've never actually been able to afford them.

MMM - thats an interesting point.

Thread hijack!

MMM, med school is a pretty intense course at times, partly ime because of the type of people that it attracts (competitive and academic) as much as the workload itself. Which uni are you going to?
I can only remember one student who had a baby and she dropped out of my year and went into the year below.
I went into medicine thinking that I would do something pretty academic/sciency iyswim whereas actually I'll be doing something a bit wishywashy in terms of science though I think my job will be fantastic!
Good Luck!

"given there is little or no manufacturing, industry, or really any other significant employment in the area, I am left wondering just how it is all paid for."

Public sector salaries are not paid for by future taxes but by taxes that are being paid now.

Examples of what will be paid for by future taxes are our pensions and the NHS staff to look after us.

Some areas are net contributors of tax, they pay more tax into the "pot" then the Government spends there.

Some areas are net consumers of tax, they have more tax spent there then is taken.

So all those Government employees in one area are funded by tax paying non-Government workers in another area.

It should be clear that it takes more than 1 person to pay enough tax for the Government to then use that tax to pay for a state employee.

So having 50% of people in Government Employment is clearly not going to work.

What percentage does work is a very good question....

I read recently that under Tony Blair the percentage of tax spent on public services and number of poeple employed by the state remained fairly stable under Tony Blair. He pretty much kept in line with tory proposals from the previous administration.

However since GB became PM the figures have increased drastically both in terms of % spend and number of employees.

But I think I read it in the Spectator...so you know...

Does anyone know if that's right?

Badgers - that's how I assess it too.
There must be a tipping point where the private sector simply cannot sustain the public sector without huge tax hikes. But what is the tipping point?

Given that a major attraction of being a public servant is the level pension which most could not expect achieve in the private sector I included that in my post about paying for public sector employees.
But many people seem to be of the opinion that the tax/NI and even council tax they have paid into the pot more than covers what they've taken out when the truth is it rarely touches the sides.
And that has always been the case.

That's why the treasury is in such a bad state it has been mismanaged for years, the pensions pots were robbed, the reserves sold off, money borrowed without a thought that it was our children that would continue to pay back the governments borrowing for their working lives, next we'll be going cap in hand to the IMF, it's shocking.

I don't actually blame alister Darling for any of this, it was Gordon Brown and still is Gordon Brown who holds the purse strings.

The iron chancellor?, what a joke.

without a thought that it was our children that would continue to pay back the governments borrowing for their working lives

But equally a lot of children have benefited dramatically from the money being spent, it's now up to them to use the skills they've been taught, the better diets as a result of tax credits/fruit vouchers and health campaigns to their advantage and be good workers and pay back what has been spent on them.
The fact that most won't is a whole different debate.