...And therein more proof that some people will take exception to even the most straightforward case, regardless of how it is presented.Let's start off by being clear in terminology: I'm using the term "welfare" to define all DWP spending that isn't state pensions. Evidently you'd like a more nuanced definition. Now. Where did I say that because civil servants compiled the figures they must be accurate? I did not. That the civil service has accounted for employees' pensions within a "welfare" budget-head simply enables us to decide the motivation for the way the figures were presented. You want us to believe that this is a vast right-wing conspiracy to enlighten the Daily Mail and Telegraph as to the amount spent on benefits. As if they didn't know this already and were reporting it as such long before the pie chart came out. The second non-issue you took exception to was my claim that aside from welfare the pie chart is broadly accurate. And it is. Because whether welfare consumes 13 or 25% of spending, you're not (at least, not yet) disputing that the relative expenditures between policing and health and education are *broadly accurate*. In itself this information serves a useful purpose for taxpayers who, until now, have never had information on government spending presented in roughly the same way as councils are required to document local spending when council tax bills are issued and who, as studies have found, overestimate the amounts spent on welfare compared to more productive uses of taxpayers' money.Finally, let's turn to the underlying problem with your reply: the nonsense that welfare expenditure is not vast. Some front, incidentally, from a Green Party activist who wants to put every adult in the country on welfare (http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/08/citizens-income-71-week-person-would-make-britain-fairer), but let's not digress.The government, outside welfare and pensions spending, is now smaller than at any time since the early 1940s. And yet the state takes vastly more in taxes than it did in the 1940s. The reason? Spending on pensions and welfare has exploded.We have a national debt of £1.7 trillion - and rising. This is at root a debt crisis. It's because our country - in fact nearly all western economies - have been living beyond their means whilst becoming less competitive and demanding higher standards of living than the emerging economies of Asia and South America. And it's coincided with the explosion in capacity of capital to relocate wherever it is best protected. I have to ask how someone as well educated as you, Richard, arrives at the conclusion that the answer to these realities is to borrow more, spend even more on welfare and tax ordinary people (and it will be ordinary people who end up paying, as always) even more. Because the reality is the opposite.Reining-in welfare (and, incidentally state pensions - not by cutting them but by bringing forward, and then regularly, increasing the retirement age) is not about taking from the poor to give to the rich: the state gives very little to the rich (the removal of child benefit from couples earning more than £42,000 has saved far more than the Bedroom Tax has, next time you want to get on your class war-horse). Entirely rethinking welfare and pensions is the only way the government can live within its means. We need to eradicate our national debt - not just the deficit: the debt - so that we can free up that massive chunk of the pie chart that should have been labelled "money down the drain" - interest payments on our debt. The Conservatives are dishonest about this: doing that requires tax rises as well as cuts into the medium term, but at least they recognise the problem. In other words, the pie chart is the very least of your problems, Richard.
Adam Gray ● 3869d