>>1949494states are generally very efficient at collecting taxes from everyone and giving out universal services and unspeakably fucking horrible at analysing complex individual circumstances and providing tailored support based on that analysis. however much people may bitch about HMRC, the income tax system is infinitely better run than the work capacity assessment at the DWP.
furthermore there's a question of political economy: if even middle class and wealthy people use universal services, they want them to work. if you ban people from those universal services for being "too rich", what do they care if you gut them?
just think this through: what's easier, giving the rich £1000 worth of freebies and a £1000 income tax hike (doesn't matter how many rich people there are, the net fiscal effect here is obvious!), or hiring a team of means-testing weasels on £60,000 a year and forcing everyone who wants to access a service to fill out a form and wait for a call back
p.s. the NHS is highly, highly efficient. the UK spends much less per head on healthcare than other european countries - the NHS would be getting £40bn/year or so more to match French per-head spending (and, indeed, Western European average per-head spending), £73bn/year more to match Germany. the idea the NHS is structurally inefficient compared to other European countries is a bad faith argument put forward by liars who pretend we can adopt (say) the German model and keep spending the same to make things more efficient - nobody ever suggests we simply apply German funding levels to the current model.
(moreover, within the NHS itself there's been a fun experiment since devolution: Scotland was much less enthusiastic for reform than England. Health spending in Scotland has subtly been squeezed compared to other Scottish spending since devolution - yet the Scottish NHS works more-or-less as well as the English one, despite NHS England having god-knows how many reforms to introduce pretend market mechanisms, permanently bankrupt foundation trusts, and other neoliberal wheezes which even the May government belatedly realized were a total joke that got in the way of simply letting medical staff care for patients.)
>>1950825there are more poor people than ric
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