As we know, there is no waste in the govnermental system at all. Every single penny extorted from the populace at gunpoint is spent on vital services which can only be provided by enforced collective action. There is nothing that could be done better individually, no areas where voluntary collective action might work better and most certainly no fat at all that could be cut so that more is provided for the tax payer’s money, or heavens to Betsy, the extortion lowered a little. Nope, we know this:
A report by parliament’s watchdog, the National Audit Office, reveals
the extraordinary prices that the country’s 554,000 civil servants are
paying for everything from Post-it notes to broadband access. Some
departments appear willing to pay well over the odds to ensure that
their supplies have their own brand name on them. As a result, the
report says, Gordon Brown, the chancellor, could save £660m a year
simply by getting better deals on office equipment.
Isn’t localism the mantra these days?
The auditors had picked three simple items of equipment – Post
it-notes, recycled paper and toner cartridges for printers – to check
the price paid across the government’s 200 ministries and quangos. The
data showed that hugely different prices were being paid for the same
items. For Post-it notes the cheapest price Whitehall could find was
£4.41 for a pack of 12, while some departments paid as much as £10.55 –
139% more expensive. Yet the Guardian found that even the best price
could easily be beaten: at Chartered Supplies in central London, for
example, a pack of 12 unbranded notes costs £1.75 – less than half what
the most price conscious bureaucrats are paying.
£660 million eh? Isn’t that about 25% of the current take from inheritance tax? It’s actually rather more than the rise in Air Passenger Duty just announced. It’s certainly more than that raised by the Landfill Tax. Isn’t it just wonderful to see where the money goes? All because we’re in the third and fourth of Milton Friedman’s ways of spending money: other people’s on you or other people’s on other people.
Think of it this way.
Joyce Burden, 88, and her sister Sybil, 80, want cohabiting siblings
to enjoy the same tax breaks as married couples or civil partners. But
they were defeated by the Government yesterday at the European Court of
Human Rights, ending their struggle to change the law.
Each
sister has made a will out to the other, but under the Inheritance Tax
Act of 1984, when one dies, her estate will be taxed at 40 per cent.
They live in a £425,000 house built by their brothers near Marlborough,
Wiltshire and face an inheritance tax bill of £200,000.
£50,000 of that bill will go to pay for bureaucrats Post-it Notes. Not to pay for the notes themselves you understand, but just to pay for the incompetence with which the bureaucrats purchase them.
A valid and useful application of the monopoly of legal violence enjoyed by the State, I hope you’ll agree.
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