40%

the con/dem chancellor is asking government departments to prepare plans for a 40% cut in their spends.
it is a scary number. no matter how you slice and dice it cuts on that sort of scale means lots of lost jobs, it means lots of services cut or lost. a few hard core tories will talk about how the private sector will step in to save the day by providing lots of jobs and filling the services void. of course the tories will also say "and the private sector will do it so much better" and yes we all know how well they have done with the trains, so much better now than it was under british rail (oh and we still have to give them tax payers money). we all remember those promises of competition meaning prices will be kept low on our energy costs.

more than likely the 40% is a number has been floated so that when the cuts come in at 25% or 30% we will all cheer and praise osborne for his hard work, his hard decisions, while secretly being thankful that it wasn't as bad as we thought.

while all the cuts are being made to public services we will be told it is necessary, we can't spend more than we bring in, we can't keep servicing such a debt. it is labour's fault that they didn't mend the roof while the sun shone, blah blah blah.
of course there will be little blame laid at the feet of the financial institutions who caused the problem in the first place, the financial institutions that the previous government bailed out (which is why they had to borrow lots of money in order to prop up the wrecked free market economy. oddly they did it very well, strange that bit gets forgotten).

one thing that does seem to have been acknowledged by the con/dems is that this was (and is) a global problem. during the election it was all new labour's fault. now it is a global situation. funny that.

even funnier is that the reason we have to go through the austerity measures is because we want to keep our triple-a rating. a rating given by the same fucking financial institutions who fucked up the situation in the first place. fucking irony for you.

even funnier is that the people who can least afford to pay for the bail out are the ones who are going to bare the brunt of it. hell yeah put vat up, the average income families can't avoid paying it and it takes a chunk out of their wages.
what increase the top rate of tax? can't do that we need those wealth creators. so far they aren't doing too much for us, other than lining their own pockets.

more and more it seems that the cuts are not about the economy, but about ideology.
the tories are living the thatcher dream. they won't be building new prisons in the future but workhouses.

i tell you something - it has to suck to be a liberal democrat.