Osborne’s National Insurance plans – be sceptical of “efficiency
savings” claims  George Osborne’s announcement that he intends
to reverse the increase in National Insurance Contributions has
rightfully received applause from a number of business leaders,
who called the planned rise an additional tax on jobs.
However, instead of saying which expenditure items they want to
see cut in order to avert the NIC rise, Osborne and his
supporters from the business world put up the old smokescreens
of “efficiency savings” or “increasing public sector
productivity”.  When politicians talk about “efficiency
savings”, what they usually mean is that they need a large sum
of money and don’t know where to get it from. Obamacare, too,
will allegedly be co-financed through “efficiency savings” in
Medicare, though nobody really believes it.    In one of the
IEA’s early Hobart papers, Gordon Tullock convincingly explained
why “efficiency savings” (he does not call them such) don’t
usually happen. Bureaucrats do not want their