Ahead of this week's Budget you have to wonder about the suitability of the current government. A complaint about speculation on its contents slamming the MSM and yet they have been leaking like a sieve and flying kites all over the place. It's as if they don't know what they are doing. Wait, correction, they definitely do not know what they are doing.
They really are acting out the sort of playground insults from pre-pubescent children and throwing around insults and coming up with schemes that are stupid, wrong for the current situation and based on ideology and certainly not sound economic principles.
On Wednesday we will know what they are going to do, or attempt to do. Right now, it all looks self destructive and doomed to failure. There just doesn't appear to be any grown ups in the room at all. So out of touch are they that they cannot see how despised they are and how this version of socialism should stay as a text book postulation for surely everyone can see that if you increase and continue to increase spending but do not have sufficient income to cover that let alone the huge debt burden that it isn't going to work out well?
Margaret Thatcher made a remark in a 1976 television interview for Thames TV's This Week, where she stated: "...and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people's money".
Well here we go and so far all I can see is a series of "get rich" schemes being floated out there but, of course, if there isn't the money out there in Tax Payer world then it's not going to happen. Spreadsheets are notoriously bad at this, they show a linear increase in income from taxation and ignore human behaviour. When you see the money being taken from you and given to someone else and generally wasted it changes your behaviour. I am sure that those who are self employed will find ways to avoid some of the draconian impositions on them now being imposed.
They don't know what it is like to run your own business and now heap extra paperwork on them - quarterly tax returns as an example. When IR35 came in under the last socialist government (and the Tories didn't take it away even though they said they would) I just changed the way that the business worked. Resulting in taking on less work at increased costs and creating more leisure time and paying less taxes at the same time. Dropping below the tax thresholds too and so I did the minimum I needed to do and whilst I didn't get a full year's work, I did just enough to keep me happy and pay the tax man what was due on that work. Why work harder and longer to fill in more forms and pay out a greater % to the government who risked nothing?
If you've run businesses you know that you must incentivise your people with reasonable and achievable goals that add to their pockets and their self worth. If you don't you drive different behaviours that detract from the overall goal and do the opposite. Penalising people for their success is not how you do it. Why should I work harder to give that to someone else who hasn't worked at all for it? Give it to faceless bureaucrats who waste it and I know plenty about that having watched these people at work.
Anyway, the car crash will be arriving on Wednesday and we will see what level of stupid we will get. The damage done last year is coming home now as it works its way through the system. You could say the damage is done already but it feels like this is a doubling down and I'm not sure that the majority of people are going to be quiet about it.
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