Budgetting the Brown way

Having looked at the Chancellor's new budget I am convinced that he budgets in a way that is not available to the rest of us. What I think he does is he works out what he wants to spend money on. Many of his pet projects I would question anyway, but let us assume that he comes up with a total amount of spending which needs to be funded. He then looks at how to fund this expenditure and his first stop is borrowings. He has a limit on this which is sort of defined by the EURO criteria which we now seem to quite clearly not be joining (Thank goodness!). He then looks at taxes on companies and then realises he can't do much about those, so he moves onto individual taxpayers and he recalls that there was this promise not to raise those taxes back in 97, so he finally looks at his usual sources of revenue and starts to meet his new obligations from those. Raise tax on fuel, booze and fags. Then look for other avenues. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all sit down and say, "This is what we want to spend next year." Then we go along to our employers and say, "My new salary for the year will have to be raised to x because I have all these spending plans." Somehow I can't see this being accepted, so why do we keep taking this kind of approach fron the Chancellor? He should work, as we have to do, within his means. This means that some 'projects' should bite the dust as they are not economically sensible given our means. Sadly I cannot see this Chancellor taking that view, can you?

Tax is theft!

While going on about apologies yesterday I mentioned wasting taxpayer money. That got my mind working about how tax is all theft anyway. If I came to you and said, "Right, you work as hard as you can and when you get paid I will come along and take 10% of your earnings to make sure you continue to live safely," you would probably recognise that as being a protection racket and an illegal act. So how come the government can come along and take up to 40% of your earnings and it isn't theft? It wouldn't be so bad if they spent the money sensibly. But they don't. The current UK government have spent our hard earned pounds on such useful prjects as: invading Iraq, building or buying a replacement for Trident missiles, the Millennium Dome, an NHS computer system that their own consultants now doubt can ever work, an ID card system designed to prevent terrorism which we all know won't do any such thing and the list goes on endlessly. What we taxpayers fail to realise is that if any of these politicians were any good at managing business they would be out there doing that, but most of them have already failed at these careers and have now opted for telling others what to do, without any accountability. What we need is to recognise that they have been thieving our money and to hold them accountable for the waste.

Things that get up my nose or on my wick are what I am going to be writing about. The latest thing that has really raised my levels of displeasure is the news that Tony Blair is 'apologising' for the Slave Trade. Now clearly this was something that should never have been carried out and indeed was quite shameful. It is not the fact that it requires apology that displeases me. It is the fact that Tony is always in a great hurry to apologise for things that were never in his control and for which he could not possibly be responsible. How about an apology for some of the reprehensible things for which he has been responsible? Like invading Iraq? Like spending billions of taxpayer money on the NHS and achieving nothing except the enrichment of external advisors. Like, oh well the list goes on and we all know he won't apologise because he has never made a mistake. The things he wants to apologise for are mistakes made by others.