Oh worship the Money Tree, Bow down to the Great Money Tree. Nick Clegg you really are a prize git of the highest order. Your suggestions that all kids under 8 should get a free school meal might grub a few votes from the more innumerate members of the electorate but at every level it shows you for the fool and clown that you are and your party as an ideologically incoherent mess.
We start with the Money Tree basics. The UK is running a vast budget deficit and is heavily in debt. It cannot afford another £600 million. We are going bust. What do the Lib Dem’s not understand about that?
Aaaaaaah but what about the starving kids? As I look at the chubby little monsters walking past my restaurant every day I do not exactly see mass starvation on an Ethiopian scale but moving from the practicality to the ideology why should anyone be subsidised to have kids? My wife and I might have a child. We might not and instead have lots of cats. It is our choice.
If we have kids why should other taxpayers have to support us at all? If Clegg’s scheme is costed at £600 million what that means is that a direct benefit of £400 million will be delivered at a cost of £200 million – Government is just that inefficient. So why should £600 million be taken from hard working taxpayers (not all of whom opt to have kids) to both employ yet more civil servants and to provide a benefit to one group who have made a lifestyle choice? Why not hand out £400 million of Whiskas tins to cat owners?
If you cannot afford to have kids why do you think that you have a right to reproduce and expect others to pick up the tab? No one says that I have a human right to own a cat and get others to pick up the tab. It is all about choices.
It is profoundly illiberal for Clegg to force all of us to subside one group simply because Clegg (and others) reckon that having kids is good. Arguably, in an overpopulated world and on a crowded island, it is bad and the State should be discouraging childbirth. The liberal view should be that the State butts out altogether – we should all just make our choices constrained by our own ability to pay or not.
But the real idiocy of Clegg is that notwithstanding the looming bankruptcy of Britain he still believes in Universal benefits. Why on earth should the kids of millionaires get taxpayer subsidies school meals? Why should my comfortably off father get a free bus pass or TV license or winter fuel allowance (which he will spend on yet another luxury cruise holiday)? There can be no justification for this at all. Yet Money Tree believers like Clegg just do not get it.
Being an utterly illiberal, economic illiterate is probably not a good thing but I suppose it makes Mr Clegg well qualified to be leader of his party.