Student fee take matches African windmill fund (UK budget)

[Pangloss]

Nice pickup by a writer at The Telegraph. Apparently the amount of money the government expects to take in from student tuition in the UK happens to equal the amount of money the UK is spending on an African windmill project.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8196410/Student-fee-savings-will-fund-windmills-in-Africa.html

 

This is a great example of what goes wrong when boom times become lean years. It's not easy to cut spending in a democracy because everyone has a different opinion about what should be spent and what should not. Clear guidelines are needed. If it includes some foreign spending, fine, so long as there's a plan for returning to spending sanity, and it's being followed.

[Marat]

Government funding trade-offs are almost always irrational, and are even less rational than those of individuals. Thus when Britain lacked sufficient dialysis machines to keep everyone with endstage renal disease alive, it was still funding the lavish lifestyle of the Royal Family out of the general taxation funds which were deemed unable to afford to purchase enough dialysis machines not to require a certain number of patients to be, in effect, murdered each year by the inadequacy of healthcare funding. That meant that in some government department on some given day someone actually said, 'How many dialysis patients should we condemn to death to buy a new silver set for Buckingham Palace?' and someone answered, 'How about 30 a year?' to which everyone around the table nodded and then went on to other business.

[Mr Skeptic]

Is that really that irrational? I know we all like to pretend that every life is priceless, but then we'd have to have everyone be a doctor or at least learn first aid/CPR skills. But no, people watch TV instead of taking a CPR course. Guess individuals don't really follow the ideal of lives being priceless either.

[JohnB]

Thus when Britain lacked sufficient dialysis machines to keep everyone with endstage renal disease alive, it was still funding the lavish lifestyle of the Royal Family out of the general taxation funds which were deemed unable to afford to purchase enough dialysis machines not to require a certain number of patients to be, in effect, murdered each year by the inadequacy of healthcare funding.

I'd like to see a cite for that.

 

From here concerning the Royal Finances.

Head of State expenditure has reduced significantly over the past decade, from £87.3 million in 1991-92 (expressed in current pounds) to £38.2 million in 2009-10. In the year 2009-10 The Queen cost the taxpayer just 62 pence per person.

 

Head of State expenditure is met from public funds in exchange for the surrender by The Queen of the revenue from the Crown Estate. In 2008-09 the Treasury’s gross receipts in respect of the Crown Estate were £230 million.

 

It looks more like the British Gov made a profit of nearly 200 million pounds on the deal last year alone.

 

BTW Marat, are you from Britain?

[John Cuthber]

I'd like the citation for this "That meant that in some government department on some given day someone actually said, 'How many dialysis patients should we condemn to death to buy a new silver set for Buckingham Palace?' "

But, since it's Marat saying daft things about Britain, I don't expect an answer any more than he gave one here

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/53400-the-english-lisp/

 

Meanwhile back at the topic, it's interesting to note that funding windmills in Africa is a long term investment that should bring benefits both for the locals and for the world as a whole in the form of greenhouse gas reduction. The payment of student's fees also used to be a long term investment because they students go on to get better jobs and pay more taxes. Since the "new" "Labour" government decided that 50% of school leavers should go to university, paying for them to go and spend a few years learning "media studies" became impossible, even when you add the benefits of taking them off the dole queues.

Edited December 18, 2010 by John Cuthber

[Marat]

I think my general point stands, which is that states typically make resource allocations which clearly lead to the death of some of their citizens in order to acheive other goals which do not save any lives in return, but just promote some much less vital interest. Just look up the Amercian 'God Committees' of the 1960s, where because of the shortage of dialysis machines, committees were assembled to decide who lived or who died. None of this murder of American citizens would have been necessary had the tax rate been sufficiently increased to provide free dialysis for all Americans such as has been the case now since 1972. But what did the U.S. gain from killing these dialysis patients throughout the 1960s by devoting fewer economic resources to the purchase of dialysis machines? For each unnecessary White House party cancelled, for each unnecessarily lavish limousine for some Pentagon general, for each unnecessary refurbishing of the interior of the Secretary of State's offices, how many lives among the dialysis patient population could have been saved? Was it really worth murdering Americans to put on a better dinner for Khrushev during his visit to the White House, because that's what it came down to.

 

The situation was pretty much the same throughout the world in the 1960s. For a while British dialysis patients were even sent to Germany for dialysis, since there were more machines in the latter country. I based my original comment on an article I saw in the 'New Statesman' I think in 1978 called 'Bellini or Kidney Machines?' which pointed up the dilemma of government funding trade-offs in Britain between arts funding and health service funding, but don't ask me for the exact citation now!

 

And of course the situation continues today, since all countries with nationalized health services insufficiently fund them, which as a statistical certainly kills some people unnecessarily by long waiting times (cf. the Chaoulli v. Quebec decision of the Canadian Supreme Court) or by restricted provision of expensive treatments for desperate patients. And countries without nationalized health care systems kill even more of their own citizens by choosing to keep taxes low on rich people rather than save the lives of sick and dying patients, so essentially those nations make a collective decision to murder a few poor and sick people just in order to buy an additional yacht for a wealthy tax payer who now pays a lower rate because he is not taxed to pay for a free health service for everyone. In moral terms, how different is this from Nazi Germany deciding to kill some of its own citizens because of their race?

 

I don't think that the taxpayer funding for the Royal Family in Britain can be justified by the fact that the country benefits from income from Crown lands, since there is no color of right for a single family, just on the basis of birth, to have been deemed entitled to those lands in the first place. Since the most fundamental presumption of a just society is that all people are equal, the notion that some are entitled to inherited privileges by birth is just pure racism, albeit narrowly focused than.

[Mr Skeptic]

Marat you murderer, why is it that you're not a doctor providing free medical care to those who need it? What possible compelling interest do you have that is greater than the lives of all those people you could be saving? You see, it is not just governments that make tradeoffs of lives vs other things, but you and me as well. Face it: lives aren't really priceless.

[John Cuthber]

So, when it comes down to it, what you said isn't true.

 

The royal family, right or wrong, are not paid for as art.

 

"there is no color of right for a single family, just on the basis of birth, to have been deemed entitled to those lands in the first place."

Do you not believe in letting people inherit things?

 

Incidentally, the students are complaining about the fact that the politicians lied as much as they are complaining about the fees.

Edited December 18, 2010 by John Cuthber

[Marat]

I agree that we could all regard ourselves as murders for preferring to spend a spare $300 on buying a new tv rather than using exactly the same amount of money to keep a poor person in Africa fed for a year who would otherwise starve. The only way that we could avoid this problem would be if there was a world government which rationally distributed resources to answer the most basic needs of everyone prior to using any to serve unnecessary demands, or if we were all saints.

 

But what if it were determined that some rare and horrible disease, such as Huntington's Chorea, could certainly be cured if America were to invest one trillion dollars in developing a cure? I am sure that the state would refuse to make that expenditure because it would simply be too expensive for the number of lives saved, when compared to other interests of the state, such as polishing the Lincoln Monument.

 

The things the British Royal Family acquired in the past were accumulated on the basis of race privilege (royal birth), conquest, murderous intrigue, exemption of the nobility from taxation for many years, etc., so whatever they inherit from those holdings can be viewed as undeserved. Even inheritance laws generally are suspect, given that a person cannot even legally own his own corpse so as to control its disposition and use after death, with that right falling to the next of kin, so why should he be able to own and direct the disposition of his wealth, which is even less his than his own body?

[Pangloss]

And of course the situation continues today, since all countries with nationalized health services insufficiently fund them

 

And if the money isn't there?

[John Cuthber]

Marat, you seem to have missed a vital point here.

Healthcare is what economists refer to as an infinite sink.

People die.

The point of healthcare is (broadly) to postpone death.

However, no matter how much you spend, people will still die.

At some point you have to stop putting money into healthcare (which can use all the money and still fail to keep everyone alive and healthy) and put some money into other things.

All you are arguing about is exactly where to draw the line.

 

The healthcare system costs about 122 billion a year. The royal family costs 38 million.

Is one worth 0.03% of the other?

Who knows? It's a matter of personal opinion. I'm no royalist and I would cheerfully see them left to look after themselves as a glorified "theme park".

That's not really the point.

If you take something that isn't healthcare- defence or art or education or road maintainance and say "We should spend x pounds a year on this" someone will disagree with you.

We spend something like 46 billion on defence. Is that a sensible amount? Would it have been better not to get into a silly war in Iraq?

Who knows?

[Pangloss]

However, no matter how much you spend, people will still die.

At some point you have to stop putting money into healthcare (which can use all the money and still fail to keep everyone alive and healthy) and put some money into other things.

All you are arguing about is exactly where to draw the line.

 

I agree with this.

[Marat]

But the really difficult problem comes when you have to assess the healthcare budget in terms of the concrete trade-offs it implies. If you buy an extra dialysis machine for $100,000 and run it for about $210,000 a year, that will keep another three dialysis patients alive for a year. If you buy an additional helicopter for transporting government officials around that will probably cost you about the same to run it for a year plus a lot more capital investment up front to buy the machine. But since those officials could have gotten around less elegantly but much more cheaply by train, can you really justify the additional expense at the cost of those three human lives?

 

What types of trade-offs would you make if you were the head of a family with one member needing dialysis? Would you buy a better deck for your cottage at the cost of letting that family member die? Of course not, but the government would, given the types of trade-offs it makes of vital healthcare spending against inessential luxuries to enhance the elegance of the public face the government presents.

 

Imagine the program of a partially government-supported performance by the London Philharmonic saying "Tonight's performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony was made possible by murdering three dialysis patients, for which the directors of the London Philharmonic are deeply grateful to the National Health Service Budget Committee." That seems so horrific that it is unbelievable, and yet it is really what happens all the time.

[lemur]

Is that really that irrational? I know we all like to pretend that every life is priceless, but then we'd have to have everyone be a doctor or at least learn first aid/CPR skills. But no, people watch TV instead of taking a CPR course. Guess individuals don't really follow the ideal of lives being priceless either.

 

Great point. Here's another to go with it: The company selling the dialysis machines get a check for X million pounds from the government and refuse to provide a number of machines sufficient to deal with ALL demand for the treatment. So basically the company's directors are sitting around a table saying, "should we let a certain number of people die until we get another X million?" and then they all nod their heads and go on with their business.

Edited December 19, 2010 by lemur

[John Cuthber]

"What types of trade-offs would you make if you were the head of a family with one member needing dialysis? "

It wouldn't matter a damn because I couldn't afford one.

 

That's the sort of thing that governments do.

 

By the way, Marat, why do you want to put helicopter manufacturers out of business?

(Or did you not realise that there's a downside to your suggestion too?)

[Marat]

A complicating factor in some of the trade-offs that governments make is that they typically only increase the likelihood that people will die because they pursue some less life-sustaining goal. Thus if the city council decides to raise the speed limit in the city by 10 mph, there will be a statistical certainty that an additional 2 people a year will die in traffic accidents as a result, all just to get traffic through the town a little faster. That trade-off seems foolish, but it is excused on the grounds that no one actually murdered anyone, they just created a statistical certainty of that many additional deaths.

 

But it is interesting that while you will spend life in prison for deliberately murdering just one person, if you are a government official adopting a social policy that with a statistical certainty will kill thousands of people every year (e.g., a study a few years ago showed that there are 40,000 unnecessary deaths a year in the U.S. because the country has not instituted a public healthcare plan), you will face no criminal penalty whatsoever, and will perhaps gain the approval of some political constituency.

[JohnB]

Thus if the city council decides to raise the speed limit in the city by 10 mph, there will be a statistical certainty that an additional 2 people a year will die in traffic accidents as a result, all just to get traffic through the town a little faster. That trade-off seems foolish, but it is excused on the grounds that no one actually murdered anyone, they just created a statistical certainty of that many additional deaths.

 

Yet the trend istowards decreasing speed limits within towns and cities. But don't let the facts get in the way of your ideology.

[Mr Skeptic]

A complicating factor in some of the trade-offs that governments make is that they typically only increase the likelihood that people will die because they pursue some less life-sustaining goal. Thus if the city council decides to raise the speed limit in the city by 10 mph, there will be a statistical certainty that an additional 2 people a year will die in traffic accidents as a result, all just to get traffic through the town a little faster. That trade-off seems foolish, but it is excused on the grounds that no one actually murdered anyone, they just created a statistical certainty of that many additional deaths.

 

A tradeoff like any other. What if the city council reduces the speed limit to a nice safe 10 miles an hour, forcing everyone to triple the time they spend in their cars, think of how many people that murders (by effectively wasting several life-times worth of people's hours driving when they could be doing something). For example, in a city of 10,000 people with a speed limit of 30 mph and everyone driving 1/2 hour per day there, lowering that to 10 mph would have them driving an extra hour per day, so with 10,000 people that adds up to 417 years, and those are all waking hours. To me it looks like a perfectly good trade, everyone gets more of their life and a few people lose theirs early, but overall I'd count it as lives saved. For extra fun I'm sure you could calculate the effects of the pollution from the cars too.

 

But it is interesting that while you will spend life in prison for deliberately murdering just one person, if you are a government official adopting a social policy that with a statistical certainty will kill thousands of people every year (e.g., a study a few years ago showed that there are 40,000 unnecessary deaths a year in the U.S. because the country has not instituted a public healthcare plan), you will face no criminal penalty whatsoever, and will perhaps gain the approval of some political constituency.

 

And you too, for all the people you murder by not being a doctor and helping everyone in need, you get away with that with no penalty whatsoever either.

[Pangloss]

But the really difficult problem comes when you have to assess the healthcare budget in terms of the concrete trade-offs it implies. If you buy an extra dialysis machine for $100,000 and run it for about $210,000 a year, that will keep another three dialysis patients alive for a year.

 

No, the really difficult problem comes when you buy 10 helicopters, and then you realize that the last two are sitting idle all of the time, and the two before that are sitting idle 75% of the time, and then, about a year after purchase, there's a snowstorm idling three of them, and the previously idle 9th helicopter saves someone's life. THAT's when it gets difficult.

 

In my opinion, the 9th and 10th helicopters are still a waste of money. Nor is this a hypothetical -- the point of acceptable diminished returns has to be made about each and every such purchase.

[John Cuthber]

"the trade-offs that governments make is that they typically only increase the likelihood that people will die "

 

Odd that, because people are living longer than ever. The government here, not so long ago, banned smoking in public places in spite of the reduction in tax revenue that it would bring and the current government pledged to maintain spending on healthcare, even while it was cutting all other expenditure.

Perhaps you need to tell them they are getting it wrong; they keep doing things that will keep people alive.