The Polly Toynbee approach to public finance

We can’t help but think that this might not be the very finest manner of running the public finances:

But those deaths are another blow to social care providers. A substantial proportion of the people who have died so far lived in care homes, and they have left empty beds and an even deeper financial hole. Occupancy dropped from over 90% to around 70%, according to Martin Green of Care England, and families are now more reluctant to put relatives into homes. This week, the National Audit Office has warned that 94% of councils will have to cut spending, and social care is the biggest slice of their stricken budgets. On Wednesday, Care England called on the chancellor not to axe relief funds on 1 April: the fund pays (inadequately) towards testing, infection control and extra staff in an industry with an estimated 100,000 shortfall. The Health Foundation says restoring care even to the meagre levels of 2010 would cost £12.5bn.

In other words, a crisis is becoming a calamity.

The claim being made is that as a specific area of public services faces less demand therefore more money must be spent upon it. Because, as far as we can unravel this argument, the less demand requires less spending and that would never do. If public spending were to decrease then where would we all be?

It’s as if the child ageing into leaving home requires the household’s receipt of child benefit to rise.

We would also note this:

A ghoulish figure was hidden away on page 135 of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report on budget day last week. The 125,000 deaths from Covid so far will save the Treasury £1.5bn in state pensions by 2022; savings will continue to be made during all the years those people should have lived. That shocking death toll brings in more inheritance tax revenues, too.

This is a point we’ve been making for a couple of decades now. People dying younger but after retirement age is something that saves government considerable amounts of money. That is, smoking, boozing and being a fatty lardbucket is not a charge upon the public purse but a saving to it. Of course, we should continue to advise people of the limitations they impose upon their own lives by their behaviours. But the insistences upon using taxation, the law (no BOGOFs and all that) and the panoply of state action to force people out of saving the rest of us money is not justified on those costs grounds.

We have to stop using the “but your behaviour costs us money” argument on the grounds that it simply is not true.