Kicked in the teeth again?

Harking back to Budget Day 2024 who would have guessed that Treasury would have tried to sell the general public of a so-called tax haven a 10% tax increase that applied to almost everyone under the guise of saving the NHS? But with the faint echo of robotic pandemic flower bed clapping to save the NHS still resonating in some public sector circles and talk of ring-fencing the all hard earned cash they intended to extract from us so that our NHS could be transformed that’s exactly what Treasury did. Followed by promises of some very high profile government roadshows designed to level with the public on exactly how government was going to be transformed.

This was an overly optimistic strategy at best so where are we now just one year later and one year poorer? With the CEO of Manx Care and her senior team being hauled in front of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to explain why our health service is threatening to cancel operations and seems to be staring into another financial abyss so soon after the original financial abyss we were all tricked into coughing up for. Yes folks that's right - in just 12 short months since we all started to pay more tax to transform our health services the Manx Care fiscal abyss managed to get even more abysmal! Because the way to manage a budget isn't to give even more money to people who have a track record of not managing budgets.

And like Groundhog Day as we rapidly approach Budget 2025 there’s even more bad news in the press with this week's furore in relation to plans to reduce future state pension increases causing an urgent vote to be tabled in Tynwald. And as we pondered this latest attempted attack on the poor and the vulnerable by our highly remunerated government officers we were instantly reminded of the last track on AC/DC’s 1978 fifth studio album - Powerage.

Kicked in the teeth again

Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win

Kicked in the teeth again

Ain’t this misery ever gonna end?

Because the same ill-targeted kick in the teeth will certainly be coming again this March where the Manx public will be made to pay even more to receive even less. Because in amongst all the non-services even more government workers are being employed not to provide this government seems to be totally incapable of delivering any sort of fiscal control or responsibility of any kind.

Perhaps if it was the tax cappers and the true high earners who would be taking a bit more of the burden these sort of things might be easier for the public to accept. But when they choose not to raise the cap or to disproportionately tax the thousands of government workers on over £50,000 or £100,000 a year (by far the biggest single enclave of £50,000-£100,000 earners in the IOM) as the genuine and fortunate high earners that they are and instead seek to penalise even more low and medium income earners, or make the lives of struggling state pensioners even more precarious, it's almost impossible not to hear the rasping tones of the Powerage era Bon Scott in your ear:

Kicked in the teeth again, Ain’t this misery ever gonna end?

And what use is another big state sponsored kick in the teeth when you can’t even get a dentist?