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I've been finding out lately that a disturbing number of you are conservatives/Tory supporters of some stripe or another. Being somewhat of a flaming red socialist myself, I'm interested in how you guys justify the belief that the rich ought to get richer and the poor ought to fend for themselves that seems to be the Tory standpoint to me...

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You appear to have a hidden assumption here that taxes are being used efficiently at the moment.

Not really. I don't believe any of the parties are capable of / will make some amazing change which will make tax use more efficient to the extent that they can cut taxes safely. I do believe that cutting taxes is a downwards spiral whereby taxes are used less and less efficiently because nobody has the money to pay anybody to investigate how to use them more efficiently.

Taxes are never going to be 'used efficiently' in the way people expect them to, because people aren't perfect. OTOH, I think that the major governmental institutions (that don't change instantly with the changing of political parties) do a tolerably good job of it, and that there is no magic bullet that can be applied to make them do better. There are lots of obvious and horrendous wastes of taxpayers' money, but most of them are very hard to deal with. (My mother has been working as a secretary in the public sector for many years now, NHS and local government, and so I do have some knowledge to base this on.)

OK, that taxes are being used as efficiently as they can be.

(I'm happy to accept that you think that they are, because I tend to agree, but I don't like hidden assumptions).

Okay - my assumption is that no current political party has a 'magic bullet' that will let them maintain public services whilst cutting taxes by making spending 'more efficient'. This is not to say that spending cannot be made more efficient, just that nobody currently has a good enough plan to do it on the vast scale that would be required.