The long awaited day has arrived and we will finally learn the details of the coalition government's plan to rescue Britain from the depths of recession and stave off the depression that will engulf this nation for a decade or more if they fail.
Yes, it really is that important. It is, quite probably, the most important budget since the end of the Second World War and we've entrusted it to the boy George Osborne. Personally, I can't think of many people whose hands I would be less inclined to place my fate and that of the nation in - but that's who we've got so we'll just have to hope he's up to it. Perhaps he'll surprise me - I certainly hope so.
However, I've not been impressed with what he has done so far and I'm set to be disappointed again. I expect taxes to go up sharply for most of us and I suspect that a lot of what is introduced will do more harm to our already weak jobs market.
Let's be honest about this. Tinkering around the edges of an economy where jobs are rare and getting rarer isn't going to help much - and those jobs have to be real, productive jobs and not the non-jobs which proliferate in the public sector.
It doesn't matter how much this budget helps reduce the deficit if there is no long term plan to get the millions of Britons off benefits and back to working in the productive sector.
That is the key for the future - making stuff.
3 comments:
Stop allowing any further benefits, tax credits, income disregards and in-kind financial help to parents [other than places at schools] or children after the third child to any one mother.
No post-mortem replacement benefits after cot deaths or other 'accidents.'
Five, six lines of amendment to the primary benefit and tax credit legislation.
Zero cost to the Treasury, after one lawyer spending a week going through the primary legislation.
No benefits 'judges' allowed to 'interpret' the legislation out of existence with 'case law.'
No more Karen Matthews, ever.
Billions saved at a stroke straight away and hundreds of thousands of children's lessons undisrupted by the fourth to fourteenth never-disciplined children ruining them with their 'challenging behaviour' and 'borderline Asberger's'.
Teachers get to teach.
Siomple.
Can't see Two Brains thinking it up, though.
"No more Karen Matthews, ever."
Fewer instances like that of Karen Matthews. Not none. I don't think that's possible, human nature being what it it...
Julia, I was thinking here of her ability to produce ever more children and be financially secure as a result of an open-ended commitment to child-based welfare spending.
Of course I expect that other evil people will continue to seek to exploit their children for gain - it has so much precedent. My measure, however, will reduce the tab that the taxpayers, schools, hospitals and police would have to pick up first.
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