Tax and Spend

Spend Spend Spend. It is the mantra that few politicians dare to deviate from, the solution to everything. its funny how you never hear Tax Tax Tax, or Waste Waste Waste instead.
What is it with politicians making promises and pledges about how much money (not actually their money) on various things. There's something very old fashioned about the sort of ocmpetitive boasting: 'We're going to spend X Billion more than you are'. It all gets dutifully reported by the media.
But all too rarely do we stop to ask the question: Just becasue you spend more money on something, even a lot more, does that automatically make it better? Does it not matter how wisely that money is spent rather than the impressive sounding amount of it. Afterall, the same principle can be applied to anytime we spend money on anything.
Just because you pay a small fortune for an expensive meal say doesn't necessarily make it good value for money. The same applies to buying a car, some new clothes or a house. Those who spend large sums of money can be incredibly wasteful as well as frugal. But the more money spent, the higher potential for vast waste and mis-management. Look at the NHS.
Look at the complexity and inefficiency of our tax system. Great for accountants, bureaucrats and lawyers, but not for ordinary taxpayers. Look at the system for tax credits, Gordon Brown's pet policy - the government takes huge amounts of money off people then hands it back to them, obviously at great expense and unnecessary complex adminstration. Why not just let people keep more of their own money in the first place and decide for themselves what they would like to spend it on? Ah but that would be dangerous because it remove control from the centre. A command and control economy, that is Gordon Brown's creation, where people cannot make their own decisions.
And council tax, why is it so high? What value for money do we get for it. Many people cannot even rely on their rubbish being collected regualrly or the road to be proeprly maintained. But there's lots of fancy new warning signs and rising salaries for anyone who work on the council. Funny that.
Alistair Darling is Gordon Brown's malleable lackey, the most charismatic things about him being his jet black eyebrows. Everything else about him and his political style is deadpan grey. It is designed to send us to sleep, so we stop noticing the economic holes the government has got into and the woefully poor value for money achieved during the last 10 years. You find me someone who doesn't think this country is extortionately over-priced and I'll promise to splurge billions on him or her.