AAA Rated Government Insurance

AAA Rated Government Insurance

Trading Features / Strategies from Simon Denham of Capital Spreads.

It’s Budget week again and we will all be encouraged to fulminate about a penny here or a fiver there as if these tiny little pinpricks on the overall momentum of government take and spend will really make a blind bit of difference.

Most people reading this article will be of the 40% paying slice of the population, the bit that the government is relying on, to an increasing extent, to balance its books. The taxes on virtually everything we do are now getting to a ludicrous level and the only way that the government can raise any new revenues is by playing the ‘green’ card. Yes, lets hit all those people who buy bigger cars (middle classes), lets hit all those people flying abroad on a regular basis (middle classes), increase national insurance (ditto) ditto ditto ditto.

At the other end of the scale government munificence hands out ever larger sums in social welfare to those on the bottom of the ladder. All well and good in a ‘fairer’ society, you might say, but his builds up an ever larger sense of injustice in those being squeezed every day, year after year after year, to pay for something that they cannot have themselves.

Over the weekend I went into my local ‘EyeSpec saver’ or equivalent to ask for an eye examination. The pleasant girl behind the counter then produced an unbelievably long list of persons who qualified for a free test. Unfortunately the designation “taxpayer” did not seem to appear. So, having made some suitably sarcastic comment like “no, I just pay for all the others” (unfair, I know, as the girl had nothing to do with it) I unshipped the wallet and forked out the hard earned.

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Means testing must be the most pernicious way of forking out state largesse that it is possible to arrive at. The people who put most of the money into the system are the very ones who are barred from extracting any. Not only that, if at some point you fall onto hard times you will then have to virtually beggar yourself before being allowed a handout. National Insurance in many other European countries means exactly that. If you become unemployed there is some correlation to the amount you have paid in as to the amount you get back.

You can bet your last buck that the one thing that will not get a mention in this Budget is a possible reduction in government expenditure. The whole purpose of the state now appears to be not to govern efficiently but to increase the power and income of its various departments. The talk will all be about tweaks here and nudges there and if anybody dare mentions a bit of prudent cutting back there will be screams of slashing expenditure in the holy church of the “NHS” or fewer police foot patrols. Lest people forget the government now takes some 50% of the GDP. Can anyone actually believe that 50% of their lives revolve around services provide by the state? Where is all this money going?

Has the state become so big that merely sitting on it for the ride has become all that politicians can do? A huge percentage of funding goes into just maintaining the structure of the state itself…as an example, the ‘overall’ cost for sending a pupil to a state school is now greater than the ‘day’ fees for many public schools…the money does not appear to be being spent on the ‘front line’ so where is it going?...there are now huge departments for the processing of ever more meaningless pieces of information generally supplied by people who have much better things to do with their working time.

In a world which is becoming ever more competitive Britain is slowly sinking in a sea of bureaucracy where nothing seems to be done on the macro structural level and all that we see are small rather pathetic tinkering on the periphery. To the government, it matters not a bit. Failure? Who cares? There is always a nice little number over in Europe to move on to. Why do you think so many parliaments are happy to go along with the European dream? They are effectively funding their own insurance policy.

The above comments do not constitute investment advice and neither Capital Spreads nor Clean Financial accept any responsibility for any use that may be made of them.

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'AAA Rated Government Insurance' edited by SD, updated 10-Mar-08

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