Whose Money is it Anyway?

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Just some random economic fragments from the news today. More than £760m extra defence spending announced by the government this week, [over the next decade - to be frank £76m/year sounds a tad lame to me in today's money, given that UK MP's annual stationery allowances total nearly 10% of that sum], of which £200m will be 'government-funded'. Two things: from where is the other £560m+ coming, and at what cost(?) and given that this extra money is supposed to strengthen our nuclear deterrent capability, the figures floated for this 'investment' fall woefully short of any credibility whatsoever, given that a single Trident missile costs £17m, and that the annual cost of running the Trident programme is 6% of the total defence budget at £3 billion. All the while, they say this will create 40,000 jobs by 2030. If these salaries averaged out at £36,000 apiece [national UK average], that would equate to an annual wage bill of over £1.4 billion. And while we're at it, the UK's annual defence budget all up was nearly £46 billion in 2021/22 alone, £4 billion more than the required target spend on the environment, of which just £17 billion is actually being allocated.

On top of that, our twat of a PM wants to cut taxes and scrap National Insurance [I refuse to call NI a tax: it ain't, end of: it's the mutually-agreed central plank of the social contract]: the latter alone would wipe £46 billion off government revenue which should - on paper, according to its original, allotted purpose - have been earmarked for the NHS and state pensions anyway; and that's not including any other tax cutting they might dream up in the interim. So who's going to pay for it all?  It's a good thing that Sunak wants to make maths a compulsory subject up to the age of eighteen: maybe more people will wake up and take note of the fantasy Tory economics we appear willing to unquestioningly swallow wholesale these days. By the way, doesn't Sunak even realise that those of us educated outside of the public school system don't necessarily stay in school to the age of eighteen? Led by overprivileged, disconnected fucking donkeys, so we are...

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