More irritation with stuff in the news

The 10th most important article on BBC News Online, according to its RSS feed, is that Twitter has made the right-hand column of its website wider. Jesus Christ BBC, sort your act out. IT'S NOT THAT IMPORTANT. The only Twitter users that spend much time on the actual website are people like me that dislike the service and only use it under duress. Most of the others view it through their phone or TweetDeck or Seesmic or some magic cross-posting system. I still don't like Twitter much, as you may have guessed.

What else? Oh yeah, I'm tired of reading article after article about how "Budget cuts will make <something> worse". Of course they will, and they should. If it were possible to reduce the budget for something without harming any of its output then that implies the money was being wasted or stolen in the first place. (Of course, this is the case in some areas, such as welfare, even if a lot of people who've never set foot in a Jobcentre don't want to believe that, and indeed in many places where people fight to maintain a budget that arguably they don't need.) So the question is not whether hospital waiting lists will get longer, defence will weaken, standards of living will decline, unemployment will rise, etc. Of course these things will happen. The question is, are the measures necessary?

I would argue that they definitely are. The country's books have to balance and you have to bring in at least as much money as you're spending. You can't just keep borrowing more and more on the pretense of 'investment' because for it to be actual investment and not just expenditure you need proof that you can repay what you borrow. But public sector spending does not do that. If it did, we wouldn't need taxes! We spend because it's beneficial for society to spread the wealth around on infrastructure and it helps to have a central body coordinating these things. These are positive actions, but they're not investments in the normal sense. They're just expenditure and you don't fix excess expenditure by spending even more in the vain hope it will help you spend less later. It's like eating a gâteau to find the extra energy to go running so that you can lose some weight. It doesn't work that way.

So I'm afraid I won't be supporting any campaign to stop NHS / arts / job / defence cuts, no matter how well-intentioned, because at the end of the day you have to live within your means. Sadly the Labour government in the last years of its tenure chose not to do that, meaning we were caught out when stuff went wrong. (And that's without even mentioning the £21.4bn of annual interest on the national debt that dwarfs the £6bn in planned cuts. If the last government had been prudent and worked on cutting that back when times were good instead of using economic stability as an excuse to borrow even more, we'd be in much better shape now.)

What was my original point again? Oh yeah, I want the media to stop saying "this person says this service will suffer" because I already know that, and so should you. It's not the point.

Another one: news people, stop telling me that some Liberal disagrees with something a Conservative said or vice versa. I should damn well hope that they disagree on some things otherwise they aren't worthy of the name 'Liberal' or 'Conservative'. But for the moment they have to cooperate to decide how the country is to be run and it would be lovely if the media could concentrate on constructively critiquing their actual policy decisions rather than trying to stir up dissent.

Maybe I'll write a non-contentious post soon...