Fat government

Fat government places job-destroying burdens on the economy and doesn’t give taxpayers value-for-their-money.

In the year that Tony Blair’s Labour Government declared war on the growing obesity of the average Briton the Tories declared war on Labour’s “fat government”.

All the metaphors were employed – Labour’s fat government needed to go on a diet; it was eating too much taxpayers’ money; its bloat was flattening the British economy.

In a July 2004 article for The Daily Telegraph Oliver Letwin gave examples of government’s obesity. He noted that…

• The Civil Service was the size of Sheffield.
• Whitehall bureaucracy cost every household £850 per year.
• The number of tax collectors had increased almost twice as fast as new doctors and nurses.
• Just one department - Work and Pensions - employed more people than there are soldiers in the British Army.
• An extra 511 civil servants were employed during every week of 2003.
• The number of NHS managers was increasing three times as fast as that of new doctors and nurses.
• 12 pages of paperwork landed on each head teacher's desk each day of the school year.
• 15 new business regulations had been created every day since 1997.
• A criminal's arrest took, on average, three and a half hours to process.
• For every job the private sector lost in 2003, the public sector took on almost two jobs…

And so on and on and on…

Why fat government is unhealthy government

Fat government is out of shape for four main reasons:

(1) Fat government necessitates heavier and heavier taxation that only weighs down the economy’s entrepreneurial spirit. More lightly taxed Anglosphere economies have been much more sprightly than their Old European competitors.

(2) A huge bureaucracy has grown to manage fat government. Gordon Brown’s increasingly complex system of benefits is particularly expensive to administer. Huge proportions of monies raised for pensioners and families never reach the intended beneficiaries but are churned or simply swallowed by bloated bureaucrats – far from the frontline of public service.

(3) Milton Friedman’s tyranny of the status quo teaches us that politicians and bureaucrats are less likely to get rid of fat than private sector businesses. Getting rid of waste is essential for profit-hungry businesses but hiding the wastefulness of their projects is a preoccupation of politicians wanting to avoid electors’ displeasure.

(4) The growth of pork with politicians protecting their incumbency by showering special interest groups with money.

Reform and/ or starve the beast?

There are two main ways of delivering smaller government…

Government can become cheaper if it is reformed. Simpler tax and benefits systems and reduced bureaucratic control of state services (by, for example, introducing school choice into the education system) are the obvious places to start.

The other way to eliminate public sector fat is to starve the state of extra taxation. New Labour has been able to grow government covertly by raising stealth taxes. More honest – and less regressive - forms of taxation (perhaps linked to balanced budget measures) will make the electorate more sensitive to the way that their wallets are being emptied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Comments

[Selen]

Oh my, why am I seeing this just as I am out the door to dinenr (which is promised to be e0 la plancha, a healthy version of BBQ)? Thank you so much for asking, BLW (initials far more important that LBD) here is my majorly self-edited comment for that article: In the last ten years, I have seen the shift in shopping carts here in France. Before, it was yes, all fruits and veggies, meats and fish, things for cooking. Now, I see little but processed foods and a few basics. And so much soda! Something I never saw in the past. Yes, families still eat together but what they are eating has changed as their time together has been limited (both parents working, an increase in after school activities for the children), just as with the family in the article. Nor do I hear of people reuniting with their extended families for the big Sunday dinenr anymore. Things are changing rapidly and while the people I know are still extremely proud of their culinary heritage, I see very few putting it into practice on a regular basis. And yes, I have noticed that both adults and especially children are much heavier than they used to be. Kids are fat here now, often. As in all of the kids on my block save for the little guy downstairs who is raised by his strict Grandmother. I see a LOT of overweight adults, especially younger women they don't seem to be particularly hung up about it either. And yes, I do believe it is the stress and yes, I have also read that HALF of young couples today are simply too tuckered to have sex on any sort of regular basis. And so where are they turning to for their extra little plaisir ? Yep, le snacking. This is what I see here in my small town in Provence and I imagine that the others could have a different take entirely. But I don't honestly see that my contemporaries cling to any of the famous French cultural icons things are changing at the speed of light. To end with something positive, I do see even the busiest of families at least trying to eat together, even if that means they are heating something up rather than cooking. I actually don't think that I know of any family that doesn't eat toghether, just like I did every night in the Midwest while growing up. PS. My teeth were clacking too hard to type after reading yesterday's post. Thank you for being so honest and so direct. Brave, brave lady.

[India]

дефрагментация для ext2 нужна, просто всем лень писать дефрагментатор.Очень сильно фрагментированы частоизменяемые (и частодописываемые) файлы, в частности базы установленных пакетов (rpm, apt). Лично наблюдал, что файлы с этими базами разбиты на десятки и сотни фрагментов (man filefrag)Пример (на дебиане):/var/lib/dpkg/available: 10 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent/var/lib/dpkg/available-old: 13 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent/var/lib/dpkg/status: 12 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent/var/lib/dpkg/status-old: 118 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1727102 /var/lib/dpkg/available-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1727102 /var/lib/dpkg/available-old-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1767374 /var/lib/dpkg/status-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1767373 /var/lib/dpkg/status-old/var/lib/rpm/Packages: 59 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent/var/lib/rpm/Dirnames: 12 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent/var/lib/rpm/Filemd5s: 15 extents found, perfection would be 1 extent-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 184320 /var/lib/rpm/Dirnames-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 659456 /var/lib/rpm/Filemd5s-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2379776 /var/lib/rpm/PackagesФайлы небольшие и сильно фрагментированные. Тормоза при установке пакетов заметны невооруженным глазом.так что ненужность дефрагментации в линуксе - очередной миф.\\ линуксойд со стажем

[auto insurance cheapest reates]

That's a skillful answer to a difficult question