George Osborne orders deeper cuts after next election

[doodab]

I'd be interested to understand where this conception that everything is somehow incredibly inefficient comes from. Inefficient compared to what? How is this "efficiency" defined and measured?

[Robinho]

I'd be interested to understand where this conception that everything is somehow incredibly inefficient comes from. Inefficient compared to what? How is this "efficiency" defined and measured?

If public services were efficient, the state wouldn't have to hold a gun to our heads and make us pay for them.

[Waldorf]

A few suggestions

1. Merge income tax and National Insurance
2. Only pay benefits to UK citizens
3. Stop most, if not all schemes such as share incentives, VCT, EIS etc and cut basic tax rates
4. Cut overseas aid
5. Add pensioner benefits (tv licence, winter fuel, bus pass etc) to the basic pension so that wealthy pensioners will pay tax on it
6. Close down offshore tax schemes and dodges
7. A full review of the public services, and how they are best provided, a basic aim of reducing costs by at least 50% on admin

[doodab]

Are there any sort of boundedness theorems for economic efficiency i.e. something similar to the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine or Shannon's theorem? Cos obviously it would be unreasonable to expect something to be more efficient than a mathematically rigorous upper bound.

[doodab]

1. Merge income tax and National Insurance
2. Stop most, if not all schemes such as share incentives, VCT, EIS etc and cut basic tax rates

I'd agree with this except that basic rate should be abolished so we have a single rate of income tax with a much higher tax free allowance, and I'd allow couples to share the allowance so that they aren't unduly penalised if one of them isn't working.

[formant]

1. Only pay benefits to UK citizens

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's not like they pay tax and NI to fund those. Oh, wait...

[Robinho]

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's not like they pay tax and NI to fund those. Oh, wait...

Nobody's forcing them to come here.

[doodab]

Nobody's forcing them to come here.

Isn't their coming here a consequence of a free labour market?

[formant]

Nobody's forcing them to come here.

Sure, cause this country would do so phenomenally well without all those pesky foreigners, right?

[d000hg]

A full review of the public services, and how they are best provided, a basic aim of reducing costs by at least 50% on admin

Doesn't every government do this, and find the extra 50% is spent performing the review?