Wake up Britain find out how much is your debt hole!

Politics is a wonderful, crazy, infuriating thing. Any adult who does not have an interest in politics is in my mind suffering from a self imposed lobotomy, probably done with a knitting needle in a back room while watching soap TV and not giving a care about the results but having a hell of a good moan about it when they don't have money in their pocket to pay for their next cup of tea. Consequently lets move onto the next biggest thing facing the lobotomised community of the UK, it's the budget deficit.

The UK has a budget deficit fact. But not a lot of people know that, fact. A lot of people understand the UK is in debt but they really don't fully grasp the notion of how much and how this really has an affect on them. It's those pesky lobotomisers again you might say and possibly be right. Further when the government talks of deficit the definition of deficit doesn't hit home either. To make it clear, the deficit is the total value of all debt the UK has. How much? Well, the UK debt mountain or rather the UK debt hole stands at 1.6 trillion British pounds. Again what does this mean, what does a trillion look like in numbers?  Everyone knows what a million is but do they appreciate the enormity of a trillion? Such is the question.  Well I checked it up and one trillion is:

Yes, it has twelve zeros added to it. So the UK debt is:

£1,600,000,000,000

Yet in real terms it is 99.99% of the UK population still doesn't understand how much this is, the reason why is because it is not put into personal terms. So lets make it personal, lets make it very personal and imagine this debt was transferred to every single adult and child in the UK then what would the figure look like, per person? This means finding out the total population of the UK and then dividing it into this £1.6 trillion to give a personal debt level for each and every person.

The current population level as given by http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/ is today slightly over 65 million people i.e.

65,280,902 UK population

So here is the math:

£1,600,000,000,000 / 65,280,902 = £25,509

Consequently at this moment in time every man, woman and child owes £25,509 of debt and if they were to pay this up right away we'd no longer be in recession and have a zero balance sheet. We could get all the services we wanted provided we were willing to pay the appropriate tax levels which supplies those services. More generally that everybody in some way was willing to work. Which might be difficult for some groups of people, especially those who are frail, infirm, disabled etc. Lets say we now adjust this figure and be generous to state the population who are unable to work is probably about 20 million. This is a very rough guestimate figure and it may be wrong. So making this adjustment the new revised personal debt level of all those who are able to work and should be contributing to society changes to this adjusted math:

£1,600,000,000,000 / 45,280,902 = £35,335

So there we are! This is the real debt of those people who can work in the UK and should be working and should be paying in order to move the deficit into the black rather than it be settled in the red. Yet were Job Bloggs to be approached in the street he would not accept this debt. Yet at the same time he would take help if he went into a NHS hospital needing an operation. He'd walk on the paths, use the roads, sit and wait for the fire brigade to come if his home was burning down and then arrange support from social services to look after a frail relative needing extra care.

Wake up Britain you are responsible for your debts.

So what does the future hold? This is a tough question to answer, because the number of variables are infinite. No country is an island, although technically Britain is an Island, we are global machines of trade and commerce and as such are also affected by those nations around us. Individually, we could emigrate to Germany which is probably the richest nation in the world and get guaranteed health care and social support through the rest of our lives. This option is only available while in Europe and though joking has actually an element of realism to it.

There is a saying which goes along the lines of, if you keep going on the path you are then you will end up where you are heading. With this in mind the UK's future would suggest a catastrophic bankruptcy of the nation and of living standards. In a few decades it could mean only the rich can get health care, only the rich can be buried, only rich can afford comfortable living conditions because quite frankly the rest of us are fucked.

Computers and Accountants lie

An accountant is someone who reconciles finances, a computer is a machine which runs programs, both have a beginning and an end in their task, even if the task is iterative. Both have a trait which is overlooked and denied. They both lie. A computer is only as good as the information and variables put into it, it is only as good as the programmers who input the code, a computer therefore is fallible. Either to the extent of it's creators or it's users. In the end what is churned out is then interpreted by a human (highly fallible). Accountants are interested in the bottom line only, the figures they are given and then the process of reconciling those figures. If you were to think there was only one way to add things up and to subtract them you'd be wrong. There are multiple ways depending on how they are to be interpreted. Which may have been something arising from a term called creative accounting. There is nothing artistic about it, rather it's about defining variables. 

The lie is in not knowing how the data was collected and the stories behind the data. Consequently the saying:

"lies, damned lies and statistics"

I know a lot about statistics, or more accurately, I used to know a lot about statistics. Their frequent use as a tool by politicians is like the double edged sword of discovery. Every new thing in the world which is made or discovered has at least two purposes of use. A use for good or a use for bad. Nuclear energy for example. As a source of energy for the population or as technology used in the deadliest of bombs. In this same way politicians pick and use specific statistics to make arguments which they generalise.  They bolster their own image of themselves and try to fool the populace into thinking things are going well. Sometimes it may work, but a lot of time politicians are now being understood for what they are, and it is not as saints. Yet when I pick up a newspaper and read it the paper will have a biased view of the world and also deliver articles leaning in the same direction. There is no neutral ground. When I've wanted to read pure news with less bias, I'd purchase a financial newspaper. Yes, it happens maybe once every couple of years. You can tell it's a financial newspaper because of it's orange colour. However, like accountants and computers financial papers fail to provide the human element. The story behind the figures, the story which motivates the figures.

Where there is human interaction fallibility exists and always will exist, but to believe there is such a thing as pure facts, such as those from a computer or an accountant is grossly ignorant. I used to read company reports. These were wonderful financial statements of loss and profit, the reports are always keyed to give the impression although the environment is tough the company is fairing well. There would always be a statement by the CEO to this effect. They can not give a pessimistic statement by their very nature, if they did then they would not be CEO for long, shares in the company would drop like a stone and it could then no longer exist. The reports are compiled by accountants, they are signed off as true and valid by qualified accountants. Yet there are companies who have given out glowing reports of their future and have become failures. A lot of story telling has taken place. It is only by knowing the human element a better Gestalt like view can be understood. The human element is always missing.

Politicians do not give speeches on how the unintended consequences of a law or action they took resulted in poverty of injustice.  They will elaborate on all the good points. Even if those good points are insignificant. A policy statement comes out and the repercussions for the country are enormous, yet two or three years pass and the policy has been ineffective. This is proof it was a lie from the start. But they would not of know it at the time. They hoped it would work and have the effects they hoped. Unfortunately hope is not a variable used by computers and accountants. Hope is an emotion or desire a human being holds. Something can therefore only be measured by the end result, but again only providing the figures for the end result have used all of the relevant and even some of the irrelevant details.  An interesting book called Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner gives examples where unplotted variables were plotted by an economist and how these unrelated items had huge end result effects.  They were not things which politicians had done either.  So it goes to say, you can not make sense of things unless you have all the facts. Accountants don't, therefore they should not be put on high stalls and kowtowed, or worshipped.