This morning I heard the BBC asking the new Labour question, Where would you make the cuts, to some brave representative of the business community.
He explained in general terms how businesses go about cutting waste and improving efficiency. He said those techniques should be adopted by people running the public sector. That was not good enough for the BBC. They always act like Labour Ministers, regarding only a painful cut in frontline services as a cut that counts.
The businessman got more specific. He said the public sector should try a pay freeze, as many companies are doing. That would be big money, given the large payroll. He said the public sector should change its pensions schemes in the way most businesses have. Again that would be mega bucks.
The BBC interviewer left the the impression that once again a “cutter” had failed to name a single thing that would reduce public spending.
It’s a dialogue of the deaf. Labour Ministers and most BBC people clearly have never run anything efficient in their lives, so they have no understanding of what you need to do to run a cost conscious high quality service.
Meanwhile they lavished praise on President Obama for sending US taxpayers the biggest bill in their history. Apparently because most of the excess spending will be financed from borrowing in the first instance, that is a triumph.
They still have not grasped that if a government “spends what it takes” to “pump up” demand, it means the private sector has to spend less to be able to lend them the money and then to pay the public sector bills.