How A Tax Freeze Works

...in our minds:

Your a local council leader. You sit down with a piece of paper and an excel graph open on your terminal; you realise that as you have taken on more responsibilities and presided over the largest recruitment to the public sector in history your council tax receipts have been gradually decreasing when adjusted for inflation.

You say a great big mea culpa on local television announcing a halt to a hundred non-essential but eye-wateringly expensive schemes, fire the majority of new starters* to minimise redundancy payouts and redeploying senior staff in those same areas to cover the gaps (and if this leads to a pay cut tough; the zeitgeist of this coalition is "we are in this together", so jump in or jump off).You create a Human Resource department led mandate to strengthen your dismissals procedure; no more "sicky-woo" excuses where you go off for 6 months full paid leave with "stress". Where you can't redeploy, fire or dismiss you make provision for redundancies in your budget for that year with a view to lowering the c-tax take the tear after by the resultant amount; if you can once you've balanced the books you encourage your business-development staff to find ways of encouraging business; rates' cuts, internalize or remove unnecessary regulatory hurdles and so on. You announce you will not seek an increase in central government funding and hand back any state-largesse; increase central funding when your in a deficit is just a tax rise elsewhere, and is just morr buggery without the courtesy of a reach around and you'll have no part of it. In an act of solidarity you announce you and your senior executive will take a pay cut of 25% with a view to increasing it back to pre-cut levels in line with the %-deficit cut, then %-c-tax receipt changes year on year.

Conclusion: Services are cut; there a fewer council galas and events, life is harder for a lot of people but gets better with time; no deficit means local government can be at the front of a real, lasting recovery rather than pulling from behind, slowing everything down. Money is concentrated in the hands of those who will be the most judicious with it, pensioners punish any attempt by central government to undermine the value of their pensions, I.e CGT rises; eventually a new mindset emerges where we become more self-reliant and aware of our limitations, and in doing so see the value in mutual voluntary cooperation

...and in the minds of our political masters:

As above- the local council leader sits down with a piece of paper and an excel graph open, realises c-tax receipts are dropping in line with increases and deficits are looming.

And then the boy Osbourne goes and tells you he will bugger in other ways so you don't have to make those painful but necessary cuts.

There is so little vaguely conservative about the conservatives nowadays just as there is so little vaguely liberal about the social liberal democrats that both have become as big an irrelevance as the Labour'ious government before them.

This is not a "tax freeze"; this is jut someone ripping you off from a different angle, keeping the client state in the manner it has parasitically grown acustomed too.



*= This is hard