My friend Rupert posted today on Mastodon:
‘It would really help if every time a news article mentioned an amount of money that a country was spending on something, they also gave the cost per person. We are very bad at the scale of large numbers, and a little “50p per person” or “£158 per person” would help us all to grasp the significance of things.
It’s common practice when reporting on taxes and borrowing, but rare for spending. But these are two sides of the same thing, surely?’
I thoroughly agree.
For me, by far the most interesting figure about, say, the NHS annual budget, is that it’s roughly £2600 per person. Or that each person in our house is paying something like £1000 for HS2.
And when we decide we want to double the NHS budget, or cut HS2, or whatever, multiplying those by the number of people in the house suggests the kind of influence it might have on our household taxation.
And of course, Boris’s big Brexit Bus lie:
would have rather lost its impact if it had made the equivalent claim: “We each send the EU about 70p a day”.
(Not forgetting, of course, that the real number was about half that.)
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These are good points – but even then I don’t think there’s equivalence in the HS2 vs the NHS figures – it should be per capita per annum for both. In the case of HS2, budget increases and cost overruns just mean we’ll all be paying for it for longer, rather than it taking a bigger chunk of the annual budget.
I don’t know if the £1000 includes interest, but say £50 a year for 20 years? Including a guess at interest, say £100 a year for 20 years.
Hi David –
I wasn’t doing anything more sophisticated, for the HS2 example, than taking a recent estimate I saw of the total budget at £70bn, and dividing it by the population.
So, yes, this is an overall one-off estimate based on limited information. I rather expect that there would be ongoing subsidy costs, too, but who know, perhaps it will be able to turn a profit! 🙂
All the best,
Q