| Topic: | Alistair Darling's Budget is One of the Worst Budgets Ever | |
| Posted by: | David Giles | |
| Date/Time: | 13/03/08 14:55:00 |
| This is one of the worst budgets ever- even by Gordon Brown’s woeful standards. It will do nothing whatsoever to stimulate the economy, create employment and avoid recession. It will do very little to protect the environment as the so-called "green taxes" are simply just desperate revenue raising measures and are hypocritical coming from a Government which pursues global warming and environmentally disasterous policies such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead Expansion and coal-fired power stations. It will do nothing to get people out of the poverty trap or to stimulate the economy and help Britain thrive in an increasingly competitive world.It will not protect Britain against recession and in fact may hasten recession and make it worse. It will not stimulate private sector employment. It does nothing to reduce real cost inflation for ordinary which is now running at well over 7% per annum when rapidly rising food, housing, fuel and tranport prices are properly accounted for. It is backward rather than forward looking, regressive, unimaginative, much too complex, inefficient and economically illiterate. But there again Alistair Darling was a lawyer and Gordon Brown was and is still a historian and neither of them know very much about economics, poverty, business or the real economy. Alistair Darling fiddles while Brown broods and worries about his place in history. What we need now are very serious cuts in public expenditure, a massive downsizing of the bloated public sector, concentration of spending on front-line services, radical reform of Brown’s wasteful,complicated and inefficient tax and credit schemes, raising the basic personal allowance for everyone to at least £10,000 a year (like in Ireland) to take the lower paid, pensioners and others out of the tax and benefits dependency traps, abolition of hundreds of quangoes, regional assemblies, advisory bodies and such like, strict control on the hiring of expensive private sector consultants to do the work which should be done by civil servants, reduction of corporation tax for small businesses to 15%, an end to foreign military adventures we cannot afford or sustain and a greater harmonisation of public spending throughout the Disunited Kingdom. And of course we need an end to the expensive, wasteful and immoral EU Common Agriculural and Fisheries Policies and the increasing transfers of British taxpayers' money and rights to the unelected, corrupt and unaccountable EU bureaucracy. The Conservative Party response so far has been adequate but not radical enough. It took an American journalist on Sky News this morning to remind us of the Laffer Curve, an economic concept widely accepted in the USA, Ireland and elsewhere which says that if you reduce taxes and give people the freedom to spend and invest their own money, the economy will be stimulated, more jobs will be created, exports will grow, companies will prosper and consequently tax revenues will grow allowing more money to be spent on defence, literacy, numeracy, education, health services, the police, prisons, pensions, infrastructure and the other essential functions of government. It is time to: Move Over, Darling. |