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By  David Craig, on June 27th, 2014 Most societies build their wealth from people producing things either in industry, construction or agriculture. But as societies develop, an ever-increasing army of people – bureaucrats, advisers, accountants, administrators, lawyers, politicians, consultants, brokers etc – realise they can get money for themselves while creating little to nothing of any true value for that society.
These people (parasites?) then indulge in what economists call ‘rent seeking’ – they find ways to pocket ever larger amounts of wealth for themselves – while those who still produce value see their numbers declining and their share of that society’s wealth either stagnant or even falling.
This seems to have been happening in Britain (click to see more clearly)
There has been a decline in the numbers of people in manufacturing, construction and agriculture and their wages have been squeezed, while there has been a massive expansion in rent-seekers
We also see this in politics. In 1997, we had 650 MPs in Westminster. In spite of the fact that we keep on handing ever more power to the growing EU bureaucracy, we now still have the 650 Westminster MPs and, in addition, 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament, 108 Members of the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland and 60 Welsh Assembly Members. And they all have armies of advisers, assistants, researchers and other hangers-on.
And it’s happening throughout the public sector – in the NHS, the number of managers has gone from 25,000 in 1997 to over 40,000 by 2010 while the number of hospital beds has fallen from 200,000 (8 beds per manager) in 1997 to around 140,000 today (3.5 beds per manager). The cost of energy ‘regulator’ Ofgem’s staff shot up from £18.6m just before the financial crash to around £32.6m today. While at Ofwat, the bureaucrats’ budget leapt from £11.5m in 2006/7 to about £18m.
The problem for our country is that these ‘rent-seekers’ siphon off vast amounts of money that could have been put to productive use. They make themselves ever richer while leaving the rest of us ever poorer.
Britain is truly becoming a ‘Paradise for Parasites’.
By David Craig, on June 26th, 2014 The cost of paying out the State Pension is around £94bn a year now. When you include other benefits paid to pensioners, the total cost is £110bn a year. The cost of the State Pension and benefits paid to pensioners are expected to more than quadruple in the next 50 years (click to see more clearly)
Yup, according to the Office for National Statistics, by 2062 the cost of the State Pension will be £438bn a year and total benefits paid to pensioners an eye-watering £491bn a year.
You don’t have to be an economic genius to see that no government which is taking in about £700bn a year in tax revenues can afford to pay over £400bn of its revenues just to pensioners.
So, what’s going to happen? This is how our leaders will avoid paying a pension to most of us:
Step 1 – Introduce auto-enrolment for the Workplace Pension. This is already happening with 2.9 million workers in larger companies already signed up and millions more in smaller companies set to join over the next couple of years all paying about 8% (including employer contributions and tax rebates)
Step 2 – Once people get used to paying into a pension, move the goal posts – make paying about 6% compulsory and then auto-enrolling us to pay another 4% to 6% ” voluntarily” because the 8% of the current Workplace Pension was not sufficient to provide most people’s pensions
Step 3 – Cut the link between years of NI contributions and entitlement to the state pension, so that the state pension becomes a “benefit” (like unemployment benefit) rather than an “entitlement” based on years of NI contributions
Step 4 – Once the state pension becomes a benefit, not an entitlement, only those with little to no pension savings will get the state pension
This means that, for anyone earning less than say £20,000, every pound they save into a pension scheme will result in reducing their eligibility for the state pension. They are being suckered. In fact, unless you’re going to be able to save at least £200,000 into your pension pot, it’s probably not worth saving anything at all.
In the meantime, our rulers will keep on increasing the age at which the state pension will be paid to us, while preserving their own early retirement opportunities.
This move towards compulsory saving and abolition of the state pension for all but the very poor will happen over several years – maybe 15 to 20. But it will happen as the state pension is becoming ever more unaffordable.
Oh, and to really cheer everybody up, here’s the National Debt Clock https://www.nationaldebtclock.co.uk/ Aaaaaarrrrrghggggghhhhh!
By David Craig, on June 25th, 2014 I have written before about an absolutely catastrophic (for Britain) change in the way votes are conducted in the EU Council of Ministers after November 2014 www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/9608
Although our politicians are very quiet about this massive change, in November 2014 a huge number of areas move away from unanimity (where any one country can veto proposals) to ‘Qualified Majority Voting’ (QMV) where all countries lose their right to veto proposals.
We’re about to see the horrific results of QMV this week if Cameron forces a vote on the choice of Europhiliac United States of Europe time-server Jean-Claude Juncker to be the next president of the European Commission.
While drooling over how wonderful the EU is (for them and their job prospects) our leaders witter on about Britain being ‘at the centre of Europe’ and ‘Britain’s influence in Europe’ and Britain ‘having a place at the high table’ and other such clichés. But the appointment of the allegedly dim-witted, self-serving, greedy drunkard, Jean-Claude Juncker, to run the EUSSR will expose just how much influence we actually have in the EU – less than zero. We are just a useful cash cow for the EU – handing over £52m a day (that we’re having to borrow) and serving as a dumping ground for the EU’s unemployed and unemployable.
Here are some British bulldogs. Can you spot the odd one out?
(By the way, the £0.99p promotion on the ebook version of my latest book, DON’T BUY IT!, ends in a few days. Get a copy now before the price goes up again www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Buy-It-tricks-salespeople-ebook/dp/B00J0Y59GC/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 )
By David Craig, on June 24th, 2014 Here it is, the house I’ve been wanting to buy
But sadly I can’t quite afford it. After all, the paltry £1,200 or so a year I ‘earn’ from writing books just about covers my beer bill.
Now, if everyone reading my blog were to donate £200 each to my ‘buy me a house’ fund, then after selling my current home, I could afford it.
Or if I could find a rich sponsor who would subsidise me while I write a few new books, then I could afford it. After all, I’m hopefully doing some kind of public service by writing about some things the mainstream media prefers to ignore in the hope they’ll go away.
Or I suppose I could get a job. But as I’ve been blacklisted from the management consultancy industry for writing a couple of whistleblowing books – RIP-OFF and PLUNDERING THE PUBLIC SECTOR – that’s not quite as simple as it should be.
But until then, all I can do is dream, dream, dream.
By David Craig, on June 22nd, 2014 We’ve got NIMBYs, DINKs, MILs, SAHMs, RFFMs and many more acronyms to describe groups of people we may love or loathe. So let me invent another acronym to add to an already rich collection – BOOBs. BOOBs stands for Bungling Over-promoted Over-paid Buffoons.
The BOOB most recently in the news is, of course, England football manager Roy Hodgson on over £3m a year plus generous expenses. His team, which couldn’t pass the ball, couldn’t attack and couldn’t defend, achieved the worst results in a World Cup for over half a century. Following his abject failure, the other BOOBs at the FA immediately voiced their support for him keeping his job. The BOOBs always stick together and protect each other. After all, apart from blowing £120m on the St George’s Park facility to develop coaches and managers of the future, what have the BOOBs at the FA ever done for English football? FA – that’s what!
I recently wrote about the BOOBs in charge of British tennis. The former head of the LTA (Lawn Tennis Association) was paid a massive £640,000 a year plus generous expenses. The new head of the LTA gets £497,000 a year plus generous expenses. The LTA spends around £40m a year and has blown another £40m on a state of the art training facility and has still not managed to produce a single world-class player – Henman, Rusedski and Murray all trained outside the LTA BOOBs’ deadening bureaucracy.
As for other sports. Rugby – lots of money spent by and on the BOOBs – totally thrashed by New Zealand. Cricket – lots of money spent by and on the BOOBs – totally thrashed by Australia.
But Britain’s BOOBs are not just wrecking sport while enriching themselves. They seem to be everywhere where taxpayers’ money is up for grabs.
The NHS – previously run by the true king of BOOBs, Sir David Nicholson. Over 1,200 killed at the Mid-Stafford NHS Trust (for which he was directly responsible), about £4bn wasted on a worthless computer system which was eventually scrapped and tens of millions squandered on legal fees and compensation silencing whistleblowers who could have revealed just how appalling Nicholson’s NHS actually was. Sir David Nicholson – a magnificent example of a Bungling Over-promoted Over-paid Buffoon.
Then there’s the fragrant Baroness Ashton – perhaps the queen of BOOBs. Never elected to any important post in her life, she somehow became the world’s highest paid diplomat. And what did she achieve? With Iran she completely failed to slow down the mad mullahs’ rush to become a nuclear-armed state so they can wipe out Israel. As for the Ukraine, her other great diplomatic ‘triumph’. The Ukraine could have continued trading with both Russia and the EU. But BOOB Ashton apparently gave the Ukraine an ultimatum – if the Ukraine joined the Russia-dominated Eastern free-trade area, the EU would refuse to increase cooperation with the country. Brilliant? No, a disaster whose consequences we still can’t predict.
Then there are all the BOOBs in charge of the laughable Border Agency, the ineffective Ofgem, the impotent Ofwat, the floundering Financial Conduct Authority, the pathetic paedophiliac BBC, the bungling Bank of England (which gave us the greatest recession in British history), the dreadfully-led British military (which has just lost two wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan) – BOOBs all of them.
In fact, I can’t think of a single body in Britain that is not run by a bunch of BOOBs.
By David Craig, on June 21st, 2014 One of the big stories yesterday was that the number of ‘displaced persons’ in the world has hit a record of 51,200,000. As usual the whining, handwringing, over-paid, over-pensioned, job-for-life lefties at the BBC and similar news outlets spun the story as somehow being the fault of the developed West for not doing enough to help those forced to flee their homes.
But hold on a minute. I haven’t been out killing and raping and setting off bombs and otherwise terrifying people into fleeing their homes and putting up with a hellish life in refugee camps. Neither has anybody I know. So, how come I and the billion or so others in developed countries are to blame for the massive and ever-growing refugee crisis?
But who could be to blame? As usual, I’ll try to go behind the ‘shock, horror’ headlines and bring you the unfortunate and inconvenient facts that the BBC and other ‘opinion leaders’ often ‘forget’ to mention.
Here’s a chart of the ‘Top Ten’ countries for refugees (click to see more clearly)
Source: UNHCR www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html
(I’ve coloured those countries where the refugee crisis may well be linked to the Religion of Peace in red and the others in blue)
I’m amazed! Who would have thunk it? I think we can begin to guess who and what are responsible for the world’s worsening refugee crisis.
I rest my case.
(And if you haven’t clicked on the video clip I provided a link for yesterday – the clip of Lebanese Christian Brigitte Gabriel providing her view of the danger the RoP presents to the developed world – you really should. She’s stunningly articulate and stunningly to-the-point. Moreover, being a woman from a Middle East country, she says things no Western journalist could ever say without losing their job and being branded a raaaaacccciiiiisssssttttt!!!!!)
By David Craig, on June 19th, 2014 This year I expect we’ll get the usual strikes by Britain’s teachers demanding more money, more pensions, more free time, more everything. But perhaps we should be paying our teachers by their results rather than by how much they shout and scream.
And their results aren’t too impressive. There’s a series of internationals tests – the PISA tests (Programme for International Student Assessment) carried out every three years. These have become the most influential rankings in international education, based on tests taken by more than 500,000 secondary school pupils. These measure education standards in Europe, North and South America, Australasia and parts of the Middle East and Asia. Tunisia was the only African country that participated.
Here are the PISA results since 2000 (click to see more clearly)
Each time, the UK has fallen ever lower in the three main areas tested – maths, reading and science. In 2012, the dismal news continued with Britain dropping from 16th to 21st in science, though in reading Britain stabilised at 23rd and in maths at 26th.
It should perhaps be noted that the worst falls in rankings occurred under Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ New Labour when government spending (wasting?) on education and training shot up from £38bn a year to over £73bn a year over the ten years from 1997 to 2007.
But education matters. Here’s a chart showing employment by educational level (click to see more clearly)
It proves the obvious – the better educated one is, the more likely one is to be in employment. Though there’s one interesting statistic – those with apprenticeships are more likely to be in full-time employment than those with degrees. This should hopefully expose the stupidity of New Labour turning technical colleges and polytechnics into universities in their attempt to get half of our children to go to university, often to get totally useless and expensive degrees.
As for our teachers. Maybe they should get a pay rise when Britain gets back into the top ten in the PISA rankings? Until then, they should be doing better.
(remember my latest book DON’T BUY IT! is available from Amazon as an ebook at only £0.99p for a very limited period. You can read it on a Kindle reader, your smartphone or your computer. Now is the time to get a copy before the promotion ends https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Buy-It-tricks-salespeople-ebook/dp/B00J0Y59GC/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 )
By David Craig, on June 18th, 2014 From what David Cameron, William Hague and the docile mainstream media have been telling us for the last few years, you might have got the impression that Iran was ruled by a bunch of frighteningly mad mullahs intent on building nuclear weapons and causing global chaos (click to see more clearly)
You might also have thought that the rebels fighting the awful, brutal dictator Bashar “Basher” Al-Assad were brave freedom fighters wanting to restore democracy and peace to their blighted country. You might even have believed that we, David “Tony Blair” Cameron and William “Winston” Hague wanted to send British planes and troops in to help the Syrian rebels and were only stopped from this lunacy when Vladimir Putin told us he was supporting Assad and we should get stuffed.
If this is what you thought, then clearly you must be pretty stupid.
As any fule kno, the Iranians are wonderful, peace-loving, tolerant people who wouldn’t dream of trying to wipe Israel off the face of the earth the moment they get their grubby hands on a few nukes. The Iranians are our friends.
As for those Syrian rebels, well they’re ghastly, homicidal, murdering maniacs who should be wiped out as soon as possible.
When the British public are so dim, it’s lucky we have great leaders like Cameron and Hague and, of course, the fragrant Baroness Ashton, with their deep understanding of world affairs otherwise we wouldn’t know who our friends are and who are our enemies.
By David Craig, on June 15th, 2014 As Islamists sweep effortlessly into Iraq from Syria, I feel obliged to repeat a post I wrote 6 months ago.
Our leaders have spent the last 6 months assuring us that Russia is an evil empire run by a James-Bondian villain – Vladimir Putin. At the same time they try to reassure us that Isl*m is a religion of peace and tolerance and that Isl*m poses no threat to our country. As for the brutal murder and attempted beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby on a London street, well that nice Mr Cameron assured us that this horror had nothing to do with Isl*m, in spite of the killers’ insistence that it did.
Here’s a picture with six clowns and one great international statesman. Can you spot who are the clowns and who is the great international statesman?
It has become fashionable in the press to criticise Putin over the lack of real democracy in Russia. But Russia is not Kensington or Notting Hill Gate where most of Britain’s chattering classes live. Russia is a huge, almost ungovernable country. Russia’s surface area is 17,098,246 km2 compared to the US at 9,629,091 km2 and Britain at a pathetic 242,900 km2. So, Russia is almost twice as large as the US and seventy times larger than the UK.
Moreover, Russia was facing complete chaos until Putin took over. Putin has been the best thing that every happened to Russia since Boney M sang “Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen”. Under Putin’s rule, the earnings from Russia’s oil, gas and minerals have not been squandered as they are in most other resource-rich developing countries. Instead they have been (more or less) invested in imposing order in this vast country, in modernising it and in building a new middle class of highly educated people. Visit any holiday resort around the world, and the people you’ll see buying holiday homes and yachts are mostly Russians. This is an incredible, almost unbelievable change from just a couple of decades ago and light years away from what happened when Russia was the Soviet Union.
Of course, there have been problems. You can’t move from totalitarianism to chaos then to peaceful development and national economic success in just a few decades without a certain degree of central control. And you can’t have a country earning so much wealth without some of it being siphoned off by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen.
We are making a terrible mistake in constantly attacking Putin over supposed human rights abuses and events in the Ukraine. The West and Putin have one common enemy – radical Isl*m.
But instead of understanding this and working together with Russia to fight the spread of radical Islam, idiots Cameron, Hague, Obama, Kerry and Hollande want to start a new Cold War with Russia while letting Isl*mists over-run the Middle East and create a new caliphate which will constantly be at war with the West.
It’s time to stop demonising Putin and to realise that Russia and the West are on the same side.
But how long will it take for the pathetic clowns that rule us to tell the difference between our friends and our enemies?
By David Craig, on June 14th, 2014 As it’s the weekend, I’ll keep this short.
Hopefully readers all know that the Coalition has been ‘printing money’. If this had happened a couple of decades ago, the Government would have actually had to print a few hundred bilion £5, £10 and £20 notes. Now, using ‘quantitative easing’, the Government can create this money electronically and then use it to lend to itself (by buying Government bonds) in order to keep its own borrowing costs low.
Our great chancellor, Baronet George Osborne, is behind this policy as it lets him double our national debt from £700bn to £1.4trn between 2010 and 2015 without anybody really noticing this is happening.
But George Osborne – a man without the same amount of economic understanding as his predecessor, Scottish sociopath Gordon Brown – has not always been such a great fan of money-printing. In fact in 2009, just before the last election, this puffed-up old Etonian buffoon pontificated, “The very fact the Treasury is speculating about printing money shows Gordon Brown has led Britain to the brink of bankruptcy.”
He then went on to say, “Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.”
Well George, thanks for telling us that your government is a ‘desperate government’ and that ‘all other policies have failed’.
On this occasion I believe that what George Osborne told us in 2009 was absolutely correct. Osborne seems to have accurately predicted and described his own failure. Whoops!
(And talking about prices, remember my latest book DON’T BUY IT! is available from Amazon as an ebook at only £0.99p for a very limited period. Now is the time to get a copy before the promotion ends https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Buy-It-tricks-salespeople-ebook/dp/B00J0Y59GC/ref=tmm_kin_title_0 )
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