Why can’t stupid politicians like Osborne understand that complexity causes cost?

Our useless, part-time, work experience chancellor has come up with another blitheringly stupid idea which will increase public spending. Apparently this economic genius (a man who knows as much about economics as the lying buffoon Brown) has decided that child benefit should be paid to middle-income families and then taken back from them via the tax system.

This means that over 500,000 people will have to fill in some extra self-assessment form for HMRC. Now let’s imagine that the cost of bureaucracy to process, check and sort out any problems with these 500,000 extra self-assment forms is £100 each. That’s another £50m in bureaucracy. If, as is likely, there is a lot of confusion about the new forms and they cost £200 each in bureaucracy, then Osborne has wasted about £100m.

The only job Osborne ever had before going into politics was folding napkins in Selfridges. So he’s hardly likely to understand one of the most basic principles of organisational life – that increasing complexity increases cost. Liar Brown was the same. With all his tax credits and pensioner credits and other credits, he made the tax and benefits system so complex that he must have wasted several billions on extra bureaucracy during his 13 years destroying the British economy.

Laughably, idiot Osborne is wasting a few million more of our money with his worthless new quango – the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS). What has the OTS achieved? The disastrous 2012 budget where supposed “simplifications” caused the pasty tax row, the static caravan row, the granny tax row and a series of u-turns and backward somersaults that could have earned Osborne a place in the British Olympics gymnastics team. And now the cretinous OTS has come up with this ludicrous new idea of paying child credits through the benefits system only to claw them back through the tax system.

A couple of years ago on Radio 4’s Today programme, I was slapped down by John Humphrys when I suggested that most top civil servants were incompetent and out of their depth. Come on, Mr Humphrys – we’ve had the Millenium Dome disaster: the NHS computer system (£6bn down the drain): Nimrod (£4bn down the drain): the new NHS contracts for doctors paying them more to work less: the PFI catastrophe which is bankrupting hospitals and schools: the West Coast Mainline cock-up and many many more listed in my book FLEECED.

The sad truth is – we really are ruled by a bunch of liars, buffoons, fools and incompetents.