Wednesday 14 January 2009

That's not how you "do nothing", Gorgon

The Gorgon is predicting government spending of £650 billion next year. He says that the Tories are the do-nothing party, because they only want to spend £645 billion.

Dude, I know you don't know fucking shit about maths, but £645 billion as a percentage of £650 billion is 99.23%. It's so fucking close, it's not even worth mentioning, let alone describing as "doing nothing". So, let me show you how you really "do nothing":

Area of Government2007 Spend £bnObo's 2009 Spend £bn
Pensions (formerly Social Protection)15980
Personal Social Services265
Health10550
Transport2020
Education7878
Defence3232
Debt interest3160 (notice I'm not just paying the interest!)
Industry, Agriculture, Employment & Training212
Public Order and Safety3333
Housing and Environment225
Other622
Total589372


Source of income2007 income £bnObo's 2009 income £bn
Income tax154108
VAT810
NI9797
Excise Duties4141
Corporate Tax4750
Council Tax2420
Business Rates2220
Other8636
Total551372


Assumptions: 10 million school children, 11 million pensioners, spend per scholar / pensioner / whatever I've dragged up from various untrustworthy sources.

All civil servants (state and county and town) will be told to re-apply for the jobs within 12 months and salaries offered will be slashed by 25% across the board. Pensions will be commercial "money-plan" types, there will no longer be a final salary scheme. Civil service job numbers will be reduced by 95% and salaries will be capped so that no-one can earn more than a MP, and MPs will have a salary of £75,000 in 2009 terms and the salary will increase by the reported rate of inflation. Only strictly audited expenses will be allowed. The number of MPs will be reduced to 325. Non-jobs will not be recreated, as I will personally have to approve any new job anywhere in the civil service.

The department of education will be replaced by a simple application that records where scholars are and transmits that month's funds to that school. Parents can swap schools on a monthly basis, there is no catchment system. Schools can choose who they want to accept and whether or not they want to charge fees. Schools will decide what the discipline policy is. Parents are free to come and go, but must accept the discipline policy of the school.

The NHS will be scrapped and replaced with commercial insurance providers who will get a monthly payment for all citizens registered with them that month. You will be able to swap health care providers on a monthly basis. The minimum health care provided by the state will be A&E and chronic or life-threatening issues such as cancer. Everything else will be a function of your top-up medical, or you could just pay the doctor.

All foreign military interventions will cease immediately. All military capex projects will be subject to immediate review based on requirements for a strong, nuclear-capable, national defence. All military accommodation to be completely overhauled.

All police chief commissioners will be made directly accountable to the electorate they serve with elections that will coincide with council elections. ACPO will be eliminated. All state-imposed targets will be removed. All police officers will also be forced to re-apply for their positions with the same constraints as civil servants.

We will immediately negotiate a withdrawal from the EU. All recycling legislation will be repealed. All EU directive-based legislation will be repealed. All other legislation introduced since 1997 will be repealed. The first year of parliament will work exclusively on identifying un-libertarian law and repealing it.

All transport subsidies will be removed from all sectors of public transport. All lines will be fully deregulated and anyone will be able to compete on any line or route. All transport funding will be aimed at a one-off refresh of the road network, predominantly in England (which seems to have roads in the worst condition overall). A number of A roads will also be upgraded to Motorway standard (A14 and A1 end to end are the first two that come to mind. A12 and A23 as well, probably.)

The only new projects I will consider is government "support" in the form of guarantees for nuclear power stations.

Pension, medical and school benefits only available to citizens / subjects of the Queen, obviously.

Huge simplification of tax process (sorry accountants!) Massive deregulation of all aspects of life. Complete quango and charity cull. Minor nibbling at Business Rates and Council Tax is all, I'm afraid, but VAT has gone and Income Tax has been slashed. I would have loved to have a go at all the Pigou taxes, but unfortunately that fat monocular cocktard has lumbered me with a shitload of debt. Once the debt has been cleared (probably not in my lifetime!) we could get rid of the unlibertarian Pigou taxes, and Council tax and Business rates would be replaced by Land Value Tax. Once people became more comfortable with spending their own money more effectively, the vouchers for health care and schools would probably decline in value and self-payment would become more common.

All civil servants (including police and MPs) will be entitled to published rate of inflation increases only.

My ultimate objective would be to have a budget that looked like this:

Area of Government2007 Spend £bnObo's 2039 Spend £bn
Pensions (formerly Social Protection)15916
Personal Social Services261
Health1051
Transport205
Education785
Defence3230
Debt interest311
Industry, Agriculture, Employment & Training211
Public Order and Safety3330
Housing and Environment221
Other621
Total58992


Source of income2007 income £bnObo's 2039 income £bn
Income tax1540
VAT810
NI970
Excise Duties410
Corporate Tax470
Council Tax240
Business Rates220
LVT092
Other861
Total55193


Roughly speaking, your "council tax" or "business rates" would double, but there would be no other tax.

That, Gorgon, is how you fucking "do nothing".

You cunt.

55 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd do a little less and repudiate the national debt which, at the very least, would mean that any non-libertarian government coming after would find it very difficult to borrow again.

John

Hacked Off said...

Obo,

Where's my voting slip?

The Penguin

Anonymous said...

Arrggghhhh ! ...

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes ...

Obo for PM \ President \ King ! ...

Flat 2 year term, then out on yer arse ...

p.s. - appoint only OMRLP MPs during that period - can only be better that the current (with some praiseworthy exceptions) bunch of self-serving useless bastards ...

DavidNcl said...

Second John's remark about repudiate the National Debt.

Don't honor the state pension commitments either - why should fools who buy into a Ponzi scheme get anything. This has the added bonus of making people even more cautious about about trusting government.

Spend more on defence, less on everything else.

We might need to spend a bit more on tanks and nukes in the short term but we'll move along smartly.

I see you've moved quite a bit since I last asked you what you would do to reduce the 43% of GDP (if you believe the states own figures) we piss up against the wall.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@anonymous 17:24, I'm not sure I follow you. I have a significant sum of money going into debt repayment with the idea of having a balanced budget or budget surplus within 30 years, a significant reduction in taxes to stimulate the economy, a significant strangulation of state-provided services and I'm fixing a bunch of things that are wrong.

These are all things that you have to balance to get people to understand that having less government is a good thing and that society can function better if the state does fewer things but does them well, while you're still weaning them off the teat. :o)

@DavidNCL: I did think about cutting down on the State pension benefits, trust me. But it seems unfair to me to do so. I think my compromise of saying "it ends here" is the fairest way out. I don't think many people would be keen on working for the state under the new regime.

SaltedSlug said...

Fucking works for me, and I'm public sector.

Speaking of which, I haven't heard the consensus on publicly funded science research like at my place or Cern.

What say you Obo?

DavidNcl said...

Honestly Obo, I'd vote for you.

We can quibble about the detail much later.

It's exactly this sort of radical scale back that we need.

How will you deal with the opposition - which will include agitation, strikes, riots, agit-prop, terrorists cells, bombs and what not.

Or do you have a secret plan to win everyone over?

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@saltedslug: Hm. That's a very tough one. On the one hand, my natural reaction to that kind of thing is that I don't hand out subsidies. On the other, it is remotely possible that it might deliver some sort of breakthrough.

I think that there would be a huge takeup in the slack of state-sponsored research by commercial companies again in a libertarian Britain. Something as dear as CERN could probably not be unilaterally funded by the UK anyway.

So I guess I'd be inclined to stick with the "no subsidies" line. Large companies have historically had the resources to do a lot of this kind of thing, hopefully being freed of some much burdensome regulation and tax would encourage them to do research for competitive purposes.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@DavidNcl: the police and army (which will all be within the UK) maintain funding, the police will be accountable to their local communities and the army will be given better living conditions.

I kind of expect things will be self-levelling. :o)

Unknown said...

How about this? Bring in a credit based dole system. When people sign on, they are given a set amount of credits and the longer they stay signing on, the more credits they use up. When they hit zero, that's it, no more giro's for them.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@Damo: yes, that kind of thing is certainly in my planning. But I think that working people would generally see such an enormous leap in their standard of living that dole scroungers would probably consider working, instead. Also, benefits wouldn't be means tested (in the longer term) -- there would simply be a "citizen's income" that you would get if you worked or not. No minimum wage. So if you fancied topping up your "dole" there would be no real fuss to it.

Anonymous said...

You don't appear to have stopped the almost £8 billion annually being thrown down the overseas aid toilet unless you've included it under another heading.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@Umbongo: it must be under the "other" section of the figures I got, but trust me, it would stop dead.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Seems good to me. Nice to see Umbongo covering the aid nonsense so deftly.

Mark Wadsworth said...

By the way, to get rid of all the empty lines, you have to delete the line breaks after/before every tag, or if you want that explained properly, read here:

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/search/label/Table

Jack Maturin said...

I think you've hit the 'Democracy' problem. Half the people in the country live off the state, and they're more likely to vote than other people (for obvious fucking reasons), so you'll never get elected.

Democracy is the problem. They'll always be a load of slags who are happy to vote in other people to rob the rest of us.

It's a lot easier than robbing us themselves.

Aside from that, splendid work, sir. Though I must quibble about the 93 billion. Couldn't we get it down to zero?

Queen Elizabeth I ran a splendid defence policy with privateers who cost her bugger all. She just gave them a signed piece of paper saying 'You can kill any Spaniard you like and rob his gold and silver, so long as you pay me half the profits.'

They worked a damn a sight harder than the Royal Navy ever did, to clear our seas of enemies.

We could do the same, though obviously having to dress up the language a bit. "If any Euro soldier tries to invade Britain, once we pull out of the EU, you can have his credit card, his wife, and his collection of Top Trumps cards"

That ought to do the trick, then we'd be down to zero for defence.

Same for the police. Replace all those licensed highwaymen who do fuck all to stop us being burgled or mugged, and allow everyone to buy their own protection and arm themselves. If you catch any yob, you can have all the stuff in his house to cover your expenses, and his wife and credit card for a week.

Just about zero crime problem. Zero cost to Joe Taxpayer.

JuliaM said...

"it must be under the "other" section of the figures I got, but trust me, it would stop dead."

Hurrah!

Anonymous said...

Capital ideas!

Can't you leave the VAT on and whittle the debt away?

It helps to deter poor people from buying plasma televisions and learn to make do.

On the other hand, we'd attract swathes of tourists from the EU. Oh, hang on. That's another negative point!

You might want to stash a bit away for the 'Voluntary Repatriation Programme' to help people get back to their homelands when they realise that the UK is no longer a free ride.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@Mark W: ta everso!

Bill Quango MP said...

Not sure you should leave the NI alone though.
Its a disincentive to employ.And its only income tax anyway.
Maybe scrap employers NIC at least?

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@anonymous, 19:15: I've been advised that VAT is a particularly nasty tax and should be the first one to go. But it's certainly an option. :o)

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@Bill Quango: my order for scrapping taxes would be:

VAT, Pigou taxes (other), NI, Income Tax and corporate tax, Excise duties, business rates and council tax.

Land Value Tax would be introduced in parallel with the reduction in income and corporate taxes and gradually increase to the required levels as other taxes were dropped.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Obo my order for scrapping taxes would be:

VAT, Pigou taxes (other), NI, Income Tax and corporate tax, Excise duties, business rates and council tax.


Please note that there is a difference between Employer's NIC, that is the next worst tax after VAT, and Employee's NIC that could easily be rolled into a flat income tax, giving every person and every company a flat tax of 30%-ish. Which could be matched with a cull of two or three million state sector non-jobs.

From there on in, you just gradually cut the flat tax rate by a per cent or two every year.

You can bung Council Tax and Business Rates (plus other bits and pieces like Stamp Duty and Inheritance Tax) into LVT on day one. The total take would rise of its own accord with no need to change the %-age rate charged, provided you cut the flat tax rate.

Jon said...

Have you got time to make this into a petition? If posted on the No. 10 site it would of course have no influence whatever on El Gordo but might well get lots of publicity & generate thereby food for thought for us proles.

Suggest you leave out the last 2 lines and maybe the labels ...

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@Mark W: I figured that NI (Empr) was probably the one that should go after VAT, but as a Libertarian, the nannying, hectoring taxes annoy me more. :o)

@dennis: not sure what you mean about the last two lines?

Anonymous said...

How would land value be assessed for tax purposes? Would it not be as difficult to administer at council tax?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon, (and apologies to Obo for butting in), the whole 'LVT is tricky to administer' is a myth. I'm covering that on the Adam Smith Institute 'Blog tomorrow. It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

DavidNcl said...

The LVT stuff is anti-libertarian. leveler bollocks.

If we must have taxes (and we mustn't, ultimately) then let them be exactly fair.

You and I all have to pay the same price for a loaf of bread or BMW or 20 Minutes of a barristers time. Why the fuck should the amount we pay to have the bins emptied, the french deterred or the collar of thieves felt differ on the basis of what our assets are (either in our pockets, bank account or in our investments such as land or shares).

Anonymous said...

Davidncl, what you seem to be espousing is a society where you are protected only if you can afford it. That is not a society. How will the congenitally ill be helped and a police force for all be funded? Or are these only reserved for those with money?

DavidNcl said...

Anonymous 14-Jan-2009 21:30:00

Actually your quite right. That's exactly what I am arguing for.

What gives you the right to demand that I pay for your security or your bread? If you cannot afford to it then you must do without, steal it or force others to pay or perhaps depend on charity.

But this is by no means heartless or mean spirited. This is actually quite mainstream libertarian thought. Is this new to you?

DavidNcl said...

This blog post will be gone in the mist of time but I am quite happy to argue the toss at

x_y_z@yahoo.com

x = david
y = thompson
z = contracts

Jon said...

Obo, if you called him a cunt I'm not entirely sure Gordo would host the petition.

Maybe it's not such a good plan anyway. Too complicated. But your scheme should be more widely known and then adopted by every "democratic" government. Yeah yeah ...

Anonymous said...

As an employer NI really annoys me. Roll it into a flat tax Obo.
I'm going to be slammed in a couple of years to ease the national debt. Therefore I will not be taking anybody extra on PAYE even if business increases.
Al

John Pickworth said...

Great work Obo ;-)

Odin's Raven said...

Excellent ideas on taxes and expenditure.
How about eliminating the 'payroll vote', by preventing benefits claimants and public servants,(apart perhaps from police and army) from voting.
Also, deport asylum seekers and Commonwealth immigrants, revoking grants of citizenship. Close Quangos and fake charities. Jail or execute all the PC vermin and confiscate their ill-gotten gains.

Unknown said...

Obo - here's a thought re:health services.

1. Sell ALL hospitals and NHS facilities to organisations such as BUPA

2. Buy services from them for those who MUST be covered by them including HM Forces and HM

3. Everyone else: mass insurance, which is tax-deductible

Trixy said...

VAT is a particularly nasty and harmful tax and can be removed as soon as you withdraw from the EU.

Do I get a job in your 'cabinet of cunts'?

Mark Wadsworth said...

@ David NCl, I am a small government free market liberal economist and the ultimate pragmatarian.

Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Milton Friedman (among others) all said that LVT was the least-bad tax, and I have more or less independently come to the same conclusion.

Anonymous said...

I've always maintained that VAT is the only tax worth keeping, and because I'm new to these blogs I havent heard the counter-argument.

It doesn't take the piss if you are on hard times, and you can control the amount of tax you end up paying.

It doesn't take the piss if you save your money in your own pension fund (savings interest, inheritance taxes).

It's not a double-tax (income & expenditure).

It's not a fixed amount that you have no (or little) control over - your spending is controlled by you.

It doesn't need control over who you are and where you live, in fact the gumint don't need to know anything about you (only the enterprises that collect the VAT).

It's easy to regulate (VAT carousel aside, which is a blip as HMRC have been found taking it all a bit too easy).

I can't see any downsides, except the black market, but I suspect that will be minor compared to the benefits.

Dr Evil said...

I would vote for you just for sorting out the wretched A14 and the A1 South and North of where I live. The rest is just icing on the cake.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Intruder, "[VAT is] not a double-tax (income & expenditure)"??

VAT is the politicians' favourite tax for all the reasons you mentioned! It is very much a double tax.

As a turnover tax, it drives a wedge between buyer and seller, so buyers pay more than the goods or services are worth; the seller collects less than the goods or services are worth; and because of elasticity of supply and demand, the overall output of the economy goes down.

Don't forget that one man's consumption is another man's production.

LVT is the only one that is not a double tax - it's a user charge.

Anonymous said...

When you're in office, can I be your cleaner? I do a nice turn with my mop and bucket.

Patrick McGroin said...

YES!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Mark Wadsworth said...
"because of elasticity of supply and demand, the overall output of the economy goes down."

I would guess that'd be a short-term effect, and the likelihood is that the VAT rate would go down?

"LVT is the only one that is not a double tax - it's a user charge."

VAT isn't a double tax - you earn as much as you can, save as much as you can, give away as much as you want and you spend as much as you want - but you only get taxed once.

LVT means that unless you move house (which is difficult) you have no control over the tax you pay, and you need to leave all your details and movements with the govt. or face £1000 fines for non-compliance.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Intruder, the economic effects of VAT are exactly as I described. Along with Employer's NIC it is the worst tax, in particular because a business has to pay it even if it is making losses (unlike corporation tax, which is fairly flat tax on income or profits, and hence Milton Friedman's 'second least bad tax').

LVT (Milton Friedman's 'least bad tax') is absolutely dead easy. You divide the country into local council wards or postcode sectors, use the figures for ACTUAL selling prices and plot sizes as recorded by HM Land Registry to give an average total property value per square yard per sector, then you deduct another figure for a reasonable esimate of rebuild costs, the difference is your land/location value.

You individually have no control over the tax you pay, short of moving home or starting a crime wave or inviting gypsies to live in your front garden, but so what? It's not income-related so does not discourage people from working or saving, unlike income tax and capital gains tax.

As to affordability, this is just drivel. If people can 'afford' to pay 5% or 6% on their mortgages, of course they can afford another 1.5% property tax - it's just like a slightly higher interest rate, so it keeps house prices low and stable.

The tax you pay would be a fraction of what a newcomer to the area is prepared to pay to the bank in interest. If he can afford 5.5% interest plus 1.5% tax, existing homeowners with smaller morgage can easily afford to pay 1.5%.

Chris said...

Excellent stuff Obo'. I read similar on Sean Gabb's website, and it was like a Damascene conversion.

Anonymous said...

Mark Wadsworth said...

"Intruder, the economic effects of VAT are exactly as I described."

And I agree that VAT makes goods cost more than they are worth.

The downturn in the economy wouldn't happen unless VAT was increased, but I would want it to decrease (especially since many state gravy trains would be abolished and put into the private VATable sector).

But. many of your arguments for LVT compare it to NIC or corp tax or income tax... and I would guess LVT fairs well against them.

But take a step back and consider the argument for VAT.

Linking tax to spending is so simple - it requires no database of me, or where I live or what land I own - unlike LVT. The govt have no tax records on citizens at all.

LVT assumes that you pay a fixed (monthly) amount and you still have to do that if you lose your job. We all have the ability to alter our spending as we like, I want that extended to my tax spending as well.

LVT taxes the owner, not the EU citizens, illegal immigrants living 10 to a house. VAT would tax everyone equally.

VAT is a transparent tax, especially if it's printed on every receipt like most other countries. It's not built into the airline ticket, or airport usage, or fuel surcharge, or holiday insurance - it's added onto what you spend and is obvious. But that's like LVT as well I suppose.

VAT is circumventable, and making it the sole tax would make the black market as interesting as non-duty fags are now, and I don't have an answer to that... but LVT is circumventable as well if you use offshore companies to buy the land or some such wheeze.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Intruder:

it requires no database of me, or where I live or what land I own - unlike LVT. The govt have no tax records on citizens at all.

If you own land, don't you want that entered on the Land Registry? That's all the records they need - publicly accessible for £2 on your debit card - and it's what they've already got.

I admit that VAT requires no record keeping by individuals either, but doing three parallel tax systems (VAT, PAYE and corporation tax) is a bit of a nightmare for businesses.

And yes, I can see the enormous political appeal of VAT, that doesn't stop me hating it for its terrible effects on the economy and employment. The same as the political appeal of all this Greenie crap, that has the same effect.

And of course people will hate paying LVT - good stuff, that makes it more difficult to raise taxes and also keeps house prices down (lower house prices = lower LVT).

LVT assumes that you pay a fixed (monthly) amount and you still have to do that if you lose your job

The same goes for rent or for mortgage payments. Look at the total that Obo was suggesting, £100 billion or something, that's like £3,000 per household or something (assuming the other quarter were paid on business premises).

(Under my more modest scheme, it would be £1,500 - £2,000 per average household. But this is Obo's manifesto, not mine.)

Don't forget that the average VAT paid per household is also around £3,000 at present.

LVT is circumventable as well if you use offshore companies to buy the land or some such wheeze.

That's the beauty of it. It is not avoidable at all - if you piss about long enough you lose your land. Even in the most inefficient boroughs, Council Tax collection rates are over 90%. If it were on the owner, not the tenant/occupant, collection would be 99.9%.

Anonymous said...

Good points Mark

"That's the beauty of it. It is not avoidable at all - if you piss about long enough you lose your land. Even in the most inefficient boroughs, Council Tax collection rates are over 90%. If it were on the owner, not the tenant/occupant, collection would be 99.9%."

Shudder - back to state control again.

I can see the merits in your argument but it's not 'as clean' as VAT. No records, no tax-motivated state control of the individual

I'd also get rid of corp tax and PAYE which as an employer I'm constantly aware of the bullying tactics used by HMRC to get more than they deserve. VAT, in comparison, is simple to calculate and pay and incurs far fewer investigations/problems. There is little room for creative accounting - you either pay or break the law.

Your real gripe is the effect on the economy.

But VAT is already there and removing it or increasing it cannot have a long term effect - the economy has to accommodate just as it accommodates a rise in income tax or corp tax.

And when private companies take over the role of public ones, these services will be VATable as well.

So the VAT rates will go down whilst VAT income would stay the same or go up.

If anything it will provide a short term boost, but it cannot last since everything will be readjusted to balance out the economy.

And as to avoiding LVT being impossible? If you register a new company every 6 months and sell the Land on, the tax will be effectively avoided. Unless you want the director personally responsible, in which case you are in deep trouble.

LVT = good
VAT = better :)

Mark Wadsworth said...

And as to avoiding LVT being impossible? If you register a new company every 6 months and sell the Land on, the tax will be effectively avoided.

Nope. You won't be able to the title if you are in arrears. That's easy. And surely it is better for everybody to pay at a lower rate, than for some to skive out of it producing a higher rate for everybody else? (the same as your VAT argument).

My main gripe against VAT (even assuming you scrapped PAYE and corp tax) is that businesses have to pay it even if they are making losses. On that front, corporation tax wins out.

Anonymous said...

Most business don't pay any VAT - they offset input/output VAT and either pay what they have received or reclaim what they have paid. If they are losing money (eg too much stock and not enough sales) they actually have the VAT as a free cash float - it benefits them!

Corp tax is the worst - a million caveats and exceptions. The fact you need to hire tax accountants just to figure out what you owe sums it up.

I take your point about not being able to sell the title if in arrears... although that sounds like more bureaucracy to me as you wait for approval from the state to sell your house. You're possibly right that it's foolproof in that your land can be auctioned off if you misbehave...

The killer benefit of VAT to me is the control I have over the tax I pay, along with all my other spending, and the fact everyone pays the same according to what they use is about as fair as it gets in my view.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Intruder: "I take your point about not being able to sell the title if in arrears... although that sounds like more bureaucracy to me as you wait for approval from the state to sell your house"

HM Land Registry are perfectly capable of registering a sale only when mortgage has been paid off, what's the difference here?

"The killer benefit of VAT to me is the control I have over the tax I pay, along with all my other spending, and the fact everyone pays the same according to what they use is about as fair as it gets in my view."

VAT still depresses economic activity and drives a wedge between business and customer.

Under LVT everybody pays according to how much land they occupy and how much it is worth. It does not drive a wedge between buyer and seller (it is not a tax on economically productive activity), or between owner and local council. If anything, it aligns interests.

Fidothedog said...

Re the debt question, as much of this was caused - Gordon fuckwittery aside- by banks pissing about with dodgy trading an over extending themselves.

Get the banks to pay it all off, no bonuses, perks or pensions for any of them; not a damn penny till its all paid back.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@fido: would YOU work under those constraints? No? So why would anyone else?

They'd just fuck off and get another job.

gordon-bennett said...

You could get elected by promising extra votes to worthy people.

EG 1 extra vote for each of the following qualifications:

* lived/worked abroad for 2 or more years;
* graduate of approved university in approved subject;
* stable marriage for 15+ years;
* taxable income over (say) £50,000 pa;
* officially working for a CHRISTIAN church;
* 1 extra vote in the gift of the monarch.

Hat tip: Nevil Shute, "In The Wet"

The idea is that you give more power to those people who live in the image of the country you aspire to lead.