Sunday 8 March 2009

What Needs To Be Done Now

The New Labour regime has allocated £1.3 trillion (the UK GDP) to alleviate the collapse of banks in the United Kingdom. Here is Angels' list of a much less costly government intervention that will leave cash in consumers' hands to 'kick start' the economy.

Abolish council tax

Abolish the BBC licence fee

Abolish VAT on all house building and repair work

Provide free journey-to-work services

Provide free school uniforms

Provide free tuition in music, arts and sports for school-age children

Remove all charges for dental and eye care

End prescription charges

Reduce tax at the pumps by 50%

Abolish road tax

Promote social housing allocation by waiting list

Limit public sector and publicly-funded pensions to no more than the average pension across the entire population

Abolish transaction costs on private house purchases and sales

Come to think of it, abolish income tax

If it can be done for the banks it can be done for the rest of us.

6 comments:

Elby the Beserk said...

Vote, vote, vote for Hatfield Girl :-)

hatfield girl said...

Voting? We should be so lucky E. But if we are, vote early, vote often.

hatfield girl said...

ps

They've got seigniorage, E.

All the rest is just sodomy and the lash. We aren't even getting the rum without paying for it.

Anonymous said...

The trouble is that without tax they would not be able to service public debt. Seigniorage is not enough.

All right, they could default.
Once. Then we would be back to square one, paying even higher taxes to cover the increased risk premium on public debt.

Anonymous said...

OK, I must admit to bias here (my father worked for the BBC) but I cannot agree with scrapping the TV licence.

The BBC is unique in selling programmes to audiences, aot what most broadcasters do which is sell audiences to advertisers.

This means in turn that the BBC are not beholden to advertisers. And, because they don't receive direct funding from the Government, they supposedly are not beholden to the Government either (certainly the Tories always hated them; though they do seem rather to be sucking up to this lot).

I would have liked to see all digital TV receivers / recorders required to be fitted with a card reader. They could then simply have made you buy a viewing card to watch BBC content, with no need for detector vans and squads of heavies: just a scrambled picture, which really is no less effective.

Given that all industry players would have to have been consulted when the switchover to digital TV was first mooted, you can't tell me the decision not to insist on viewing cards wasn't made on purpose by someone.

Also, I'm not at all keen on the idea of cutting fuel duty for private motorists. I'd far rather see a maximum rail fare of £20 per return journey, with most tickets under £5.

Still, I can't deny that there's some good stuff in there, and I'd certainly vote for someone who was offering all that as a package.

banned said...

Sell the BBC and the NHS while you are at it.
That should raise a few bob.