Government Finance: It would have been more useful to set the money on fire.

How the government wastes your tax money.

The government wastes unreal quantities of your tax money. We can all name one or two examples that we’re aware of, but I want to take some time to make sure you understand clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the sheer volume of failure and waste. I’ll go a step further; not only is it difficult to think of many great expensive successes by the government, but it’s also very easy to think about how much our basic services have collapsed in quality and availability, whilst seemingly also still costing more and more.

When it comes to tax spending, there seems to be an apathy in modern Western politics that doesn’t quite understand how bad the taxation situation is. What one must remember is that most tax revenue is taken off of the salaries, purchases, and deaths of regular people. Even the taxes on businesses are still ultimately paid for by the businesses customers; again, regular people. Every single penny that is spent by the government comes specifically out of your pocket, out of your hard work. In this article I will write about a small set of recent financial disasters to give the reader a good understanding of the unreal amount of money that is regularly losing. It’s important for you to see the numbers, and when you see them, remember that this money was taken from you, your neighbours, your friends, your colleagues, your family. This is hardworking people’s wealth, squandered.

1. Community Rehabilitation Companies and Transforming Rehabilitation: £8,200,000,000 lost over 7 years.
   The government had a brilliant idea; introduce the private market into rehabilitation to see if they couldn’t possibly do a worse job than the government were already doing. I don’t even mean that sarcastically; it’s not a bad idea. Private interest innovation is specifically responsible for most if not all modern invention, and its effective distribution. The catch? We told them exactly what they had to do during the rehabilitation process. There was little room for the desired innovation. The program was an enormous financial and bureaucratic burden; it wasn’t just the money, but we’d also sold off public sector workers to the private sector. We even incentivised the longest serving and most experienced probation staff to leave by offering big exit packages. The results were exactly what you’d expect; nothing really changed, we spent colossal sums of money, we wasted our incredible civil servants time and effort, and reoffending continued to spiral out of control.
   I put this one first because it’s close to my heart; it was my first ever “real” job, as a Diary Manager to the Deputy Director of this entire effort. The DD was inspiring, and my colleagues were nothing short of instrumental to my development as a young man both in work and in my personal philosophies. I remember asking my DD this about this concern way back in 2015; why do we bring in private companies to innovate, but then give them extremely strict frameworks for carrying out rehabilitation? Aren’t we getting them to do the exact same thing that wasn’t working for us for half a century if not longer? I was hurriedly shushed politely but in a manner that made sure I was aware I was not to bring this up again. I understood right there that I was part of a machine with no off-switch, no direction, no output, and it ran exclusively on the fuel of hard working taxpayers money. I got the skills I needed and I left a year before the inevitable downfall.
   

2. Test and Trace: £37,000,000,000 lost in less than 2 years.
   Early in the cold+ pandemic, Apple and Google almost immediately created a Contact Tracing system that was adopted by governments around the world. It was effective at what it was designed to do, and was highly cost effective. In the end it was probably even profitable for the organisations in the long run. But this would not do for the NHS; in an effort to justify their jobs, the NHS leaders began to invest billions and billions of our precious pounds into a similar system that resolved around testing. The result? £37bn down the toilet, all for a system so catastrophic in its failure that not even the government could spin it as any less of a failure. The system relied on far too many moving parts to work, demanding effective testing, quick reporting, reporting to the right places, and high compliance, all in place in order for Test and Trace to work. A businessman would recognise any one of these as a dubious proposition; the bureaucrat doesn’t care. And collectively, we lost more money than one could conceive over this. All the while, iPhone and Android exposure notices were working extremely well in the background, without costing the taxpayer a single penny (and probably paying tax too).

   

3. Nightingale Hospitals: £500,000,000 in 1 year.
   Boris Johnson watched in jealousy as China almost overnight built hundreds of hospitals up and down their country. In his seething envy, he felt that the British must be able to achieve the same results. What you didn’t see in that Chinese communist propaganda was the ineffective treatment, the empty beds, the lack of staff to run it, and the lack of any form of workable equipment inside them. Blowjob Johnson, in his drunken stupor, made a most classic blunder; he believed that Chinese communist propaganda was an accurate reflection of the truth, and decided to commit vast and scare resources to building white elephants up and down the country in the form of Nightingale Hospitals. Just like the Chinese communist hospitals, they too were understaffed, underequipped, underutilised, and in the wrong areas. The funniest (most tragic) bit was that the NHS was far too overburdened with bureaucracy to even make it possible to transfer patients there. It seems the myth is finally busted; he built it, and they didn’t come. As NHS hospitals struggled under the weight of those people hospitalised by covid, as well as struggling on any normal day, these Nightingale Hospitals laid near empty.

4. Covid bounce back loans: £15,000,000,000 in 1 year.
   The story goes; the government locks down the country, erasing most commerce, and then offers loans to businesses to keep them afloat. Little to no checks were made on the loans being given out, and a colossal amount would be lost to fraud, the likes of which are effectively irrecoverable. The banks were promised by the government that the loans were guaranteed by them; essentially, an entirely new way of printing money. Just ask for £50k, and you’ll get it. Anecdotally I can tell you one thing; the underground poker games during lockdown were unreal. The government has committed to prosecuting the worst offenders, but it’s so embarrassing that there’s likely very little appetite to go after fraudsters, and there’s been little to no communication or work on it. In a mere 3 years from now, those debts will be statute-barred, meaning the lenders (and the government) can no longer prosecute fraudsters. Looking at the next 3 years in politics, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be much room to really put much effort into it. They’re likely to get away with robbing the taxpayer, but then nothing else is new.
   

5. Lockdown furlough: £70,000,000,000 in 1.5 years.
   The government essentially fired everyone over the covid pandemic, and then paid most of their salaries up to £2,500 a month, at 80% of the total amount they’d usually get. Although the government was trying to ensure people stayed paid during the lockdowns, it wasn’t the pandemic keeping people indoors; it was the government. It’s clear at this point that the lockdown was ineffective, and that the countries and US States that resisted the globalist cry for control came out way ahead of the rest of the world. And this £70bn is but a mere fraction compared to the damage caused to the economy and people’s lives by lockdowns.
   

6. Overpriced PPE contracts: between £4,700,000,000 and £12,100,000,000 in 2 years.
   This number changes depending on what you consider wasted. A great deal of Personal Protective Equipment was never to the required standards, much of it expired over time (because sterility was a key factor), colossal finders fees were paid, and much of it was highly overpriced. Most of this garbage was coming out of China, where they fake the correct certifications, and communist thugs worked hard to prevent proper paid-for PPE from leaving the country. Some waste here may have been unavoidable, but the panic caused by lockdowns was definitely avoidable. Vast quantities of little masks and gowns just sat in warehouses, after the taxpayer shelled out huge sums of money for it. There was no planning, there was no time taken to think, but what they did have was a blank check, and the results speak for themselves.

   

7. HS2: £100,000,000,000 expected, from a £16,000,000,000 budget.
   Thankfully this has now been cancelled, though plenty of money has been already spent. In the government’s goal to reduce the time it takes to get a train from the north to London by like 30 minutes, it committed to spending £16bn on a new rail line. There’s a joke about HS2 floating around, where thirty managers with clipboards watch a man hammering nails into the rail track. The managers tell the worker that they need to cut costs so he’s fired. It’s far from fiction and here are a few examples; HS2 execs earn hundreds of thousands of pounds each; £35m was spent on consultants; £10m a year is spent on expensive luxury office space in London; £5m in 2020 was spent on PR; £10m was spent on a mock-up of a train station; the CEO makes £500k a year; these are a tiny number of examples. One that doesn’t come with a specific quoted cost was the development of a VR system, with all of the expensive equipment, for the sole purpose of identifying if signs were of a large enough font for near-sighted individuals. It’s like there were no adults in the room at any of these meetings. What on earth where they doing spending all of this money and time on such wasteful endeavours? Let’s just consider the fact that the Eurostar, adjusted for inflation, cost £12bn. Also consider that this is all in aid of shaving 20 to 30 minutes off of travel times (and it’ll be less than that in reality). Considering Rishi Sunak has decided to still spend this money on vague rail improvements in the north, I’m going to still count this in the loss.
   

8. Private Finance Initiative: £80,000,000,000, plus an additional £10,000,000,000 a year until PFI contracts expire.
   This was the first version of the Public-Private-Partnership Frankenstein. Started in 1992 and abolished in 2012, PFI was a confusing mess of a system designed to involve private building, maintaining and financing for a wide range of public assets for a long time, between 25 and 30 years. It failed primarily because it combined near-infinite taxpayer money, with near-infinite demands, for infinitely stupid political ideologies. Whereas the private market can innovate to cut costs and improve quality, that only happens at the behest of the profit incentive. Businesses must at least break even in order to exist; with a blank cheque customer, that incentive is reversed. Now the businesses had every incentive to inflate costs, and cut corners on quality. The whole thing is as confusing and as vague as it sounds; ultimately, the government just wanted to reduce up-front costs on things, and were perfectly happy losing more money in the long run to spend a bit less right now (although they didn’t really spend less).
   

9. Benefits: £7,300,000,000 lost to fraud per year, plus £5,400,000,000 a year on JSA.
   You’d think I’d be a fan of benefits, considering I spent a short time on Jobseekers Allowance when I was 18; it was great at helping me delay finding a job. Get £300 to £400 a month to top up the account, live rent-free, and chill all day every day. This is ultimately what happens when you give people money not to work; they don’t work. It doesn’t take a case study to understand that; however, there’s a great one in Denmark. The Danish Unemployment Benefits Reform study showed categorically one thing. Those that had smaller unemployment benefits, got jobs much faster than those with more generous unemployment benefits. JSA is essentially paying people to stay at home, and investing in the industry of unemployment. It is not only directly costing £5.4bn a year, but it is also preventing many small businesses from finding people willing to work. The economy also misses out on the hard-working young people it so desperately needs working in the private sector. This, plus the direct loss on what is categorically framed as fraud, rounds up to a clean £12.7bn a year in complete waste.
   

10. Climate reparations: currently only £11,400,000,000 in 2022 for “climate finance projects in developing countries”.
    Thankfully, the UK hasn’t quite gotten to the point where they’re sending billions of pounds in “climate reparations” yet. It’s not because the UK only produces less than 2% of the global CO2 emissions, more because the government can’t quite find the money (yet). What we’re wasting money on right now is tens of billions a year financing “climate projects in developing countries”. This would be an utter disaster; at least when we’re wasting money in-country, it goes partially through a few coffee shops and offices in the UK. If climate reparations are sent out of country, that money is long gone and will usually end up funding the kind of murderous oppression and civil war that most of the world constantly finds itself in. This is a “watch this space” bit - do not let them send your money overseas.

    

11. Foreign Aid: £12,800,000,000 in 1 year for Foreign Aid.
    Some of the largest recipients of this money are Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Yemen. Straight away you might notice that Pakistan, as well as being semi-hostile to the West, is also a nation with a huge military and an active nuclear weapons program with over 160 individual city-flattening nuclear warheads, and delivery platforms that can deliver multiple warheads to multiple cities. I emphasise this point because where the UK picks up Pakistan’s slack in spending, it is a fairly direct subsidy of a nuclear program to a semi-hostile nation. As for the rest, where do you imagine that money ends up? A great deal of that money is stolen by corrupt politicians and directed towards terrorist and criminal activities. As for the rest, we don’t really have any understanding of where it goes. One often untalked-about point is that criminal, corrupt, and terrorist interests work very hard to get a hold of that money, creating far more political instability than already existed, even if we don’t have the means to measure or understand it. It’s a bad solution to a complex problem that the UK probably doesn’t need to involve itself in.
    

12. Birmingham: £100,000,000 on the Oracle IT rollout.
    This is a slightly smaller example, but note that this is one blunder, by one council. And it cost one hundred million pounds to fix. It’s beyond conceivable how this sheer volume of cash could be lost on one botched IT rollout. The fact that Birmingham City Council exposed themselves to this much risk cannot be understated; poor planning, unrealistic expectations, poor execution, technical problems and the underestimation of the cost, all of these are the given reasons, but read into it; they got every stage wrong. Birmingham City Council should never again be trusted to do anything this expensive again. They’re clearly too large, too cumbersome, and too awash with taxpayer money to be trusted to do the right thing. There are organisations with far more employees, with far more diverse interests, that spend far less on significantly more successful tech transformations. No excuse. Disgusting behaviour by BCC.
    

13. NHSEI: £1,500,000,000 over 4 years.

    Ironically titled the NHS England & Improvement transformation plan, this program was launched with the stated goals of; reducing the number of people waiting 18 weeks for an NHS operation; improve quality of care, reduce costs, and make the NHS more efficient and effective. It doesn’t take a journalist to see that the waiting lists have expanded, quality of care is dropping, the costs are growing, and the NHS continues to atrophy in efficiency and effectiveness. It’s like a bad British sitcom about bureaucracy; make a department designed to improve things, but the department itself becomes an expensive and burdensome problem that achieves nothing. It could easily have been on “In The Thick Of It”, being spun by Malcolm Tucker. They failed to achieve any goals and in fact became everything they were trying to fix; a burdensome bureaucratic botched nightmare.

14. The Millennium Dome: £1,000,000,000 lost total.
    Much like any part of government, Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome had no purpose and no direction, but plenty of bureaucrats with plenty of ideas and near infinite funding. The National Audit Office estimates the money lost by the taxpayer to be over £1bn. After only 5 years of it being open, it was then sold for a miserable £50m, not even enough money to cover civil servant administrators’ and bureaucrats salaries, let alone the project management, construction costs and maintenance. Again this is a slightly smaller example, but it’s one building, in one city, losing one billion pounds. It’s frankly startling how this much money could have been lost on this building, but not surprising.

    

15. TfL: £1,000,000,000 per year.
    One thing most people don’t know about the tube network was that all of the original lines were built by private interests. The District, Metropolitan, City & South and the Waterloo & City line, all built in the 1800s, were built without the interference or assistance of the government. This is why they have proved to be an incredible way to get people around a city; the value given to the commuters was so immense, with such a small fare, that a business could at the end of the year even turn a profit. During the Great Depression (which was exacerbated by US government intervention in banking), the private lines went through a period of struggle - which led them to being snapped up by a government body now known as TfL. They not only failed to break even, but now spend an additional £1bn a year of taxpayers money supporting a system that used to be profitable (and taxpaying). That’s one billion failures every single year, for a transport network in London, being paid for by the entire country. Most of the waste comes from operating costs; £250k spent on a crap logo, £3.5m spent on a new bus stop design that was bad, £1.2bn over 5 years on consultancy fees. Subsidising the transport is also an odd choice considering that it means people in Wales are paying for Londoner’s bus fares. I’m sceptical that a private interest couldn’t figure out a way to make it cheaper and more efficient.
    

16. State pensions: £111,000,000,000 a year.
    State pensions shouldn’t cost the taxpayer a single penny. It comes as a shock to most people that State pensions aren’t actually kept in a separate pot of investments that are then drawn down from as people get pensions paid. That would sound like a good idea, right? Well, yeah it sounds like a good idea. In reality, all the money the government gets for pensions just gets spent on a lot of the aforementioned waste, and then paid out later. This has led to an unfunded liability of £4,800,000,000,000 - four trillion, eight hundred billion pounds, or double the entire GDP of the country. All because the government couldn’t manage its money properly. Any first year economics student would be able to tell you that the smart move would be to invest it in broad and diverse assets like the S&P500 and then just let it ride. But, then again, that would be smart, and we’re a long way from that.

The total cost of just the above small set of examples over the last 5 years: £462,700,000,000. Four hundred and fifty two billion, seven hundred million pounds. This includes projects that lasted less than 5 years, and does not include the £555bn unfunded pension liability over 5 years.

The results? We’d have had better luck playing roulette with it.

In the financial year 2022-2023, the government managed to tax £663,000,000,000 out of its people. Six hundred and sixty three billion pounds. That’s known as “half a trillion and change”, the “change'“ being another £163,000,000,000. About half of that came out of your salaries. Another chunk came out of the 20%+ VAT added to all prices. About 10% came from Corporation Tax, and “Other taxes” make up about 5%, or £30bn.

So maybe next time someone proposes spending £100bn to shave 20 minutes off a train journey, or £100m to build a spiky kippah in London, or ship out £12bn every year to foreign nations, just remember, the police are struggling to deal with crime, the NHS is struggling to deal with patients, the schools are struggling to deal with children and the social system is struggling to help those in need.