Eamonn Butler

Today is Tax Freedom Day. That means that the average person in Britain has to work 148 days of the year solely to pay taxes. Only on Tax Freedom Day do we at last start earning for ourselves. This year there is a faint chink of cheer, in that Tax Freedom Day falls three days earlier than it did in 2013. But we still have to labour for nearly five months just to meet the demands of the tax collectors. But what you pay in taxes this year isn't the whole story. Remember that the government spends even more than it raises, and it borrows the difference. Despite all the talk of ‘austerity’, the current government borrows about £1 for every £5 it spends.

When economists get things wrong– something rather easy, given the nature of their subject – they should admit that they got them wrong. Well, the Adam Smith Institute got it wrong. Two years ago we predicted that, if Vince Cable got his way and capital gains tax rates were increased to match income tax rates – up from 18 per cent to 40 per cent or even 50 per cent – the Treasury would not make anything out of it, and would actually lose £2.48bn in revenue. In the event, CGT was not raised to 40 per cent or 50 per cent. But it was raised to 28 per cent from 18 per cent for most asset sales. (The entrepreneurs’ rate, designed to encourage people to build up lifelong businesses, remained at 10 per cent.) The result? The Treasury is about £4.

Chancellor George Osborne's latest idea to stimulate the economy is to offer the banks money (£140bn) to lend to firms and households. The idea is that families will borrow more and spend the extra cash on goods and services, while firms will borrow more to invest in providing these goods and services. With one bound, the economy is free? Not quite.   Interest rates are already at rock bottom, where they have been for almost two years. Larger firms are actually sitting on mountains of cash that they are reluctant to invest because they do not see any sign of life coming back to the economy any time soon. Small investors and pension funds have plenty of money that they could lend to businesses if they chose to.

Youth unemployment in the UK has hit another record. More 16 to 24-year olds are out of work than ever. The unemployment rate in this group is now a shocking 20.5 percent, which amounts to nearly a million young people out of work. Of those, 600,000 have never had a job since leaving school or college. All unemployment is bad news, but youth unemployment is particularly bad news. We want young people who leave education to get a job, learn the skills and disciplines of work and build up the experience that will help them be upwardly mobile. That benefits them, obviously, and it benefits the whole community too. But instead of young people getting into the work stream, too many are getting into the welfare stream.

The government’s plans for state forestry are so weak and feeble that it is hard to understand why there is so much fuss about them. Maybe people do not realise that three-quarters of the English woodland that they love so much is already privately owned. And those private owners face strict standards on public access and recreation, environmental quality, and conservation. So why is there so much fuss about selling the rest? People forget that broadleaf woodlands comprise just 8 percent of the Forestry Commission’s estate. The other 92 percent is farmland and conifer plantations, and it is hard to get worked up about who owns either of those.

It won’t be for a while yet, but the UK seems headed for another financial crisis. And this time, the government won’t be able to blame the banks. The blame will lie squarely on our own determination to vote ourselves generous healthcare, welfare and pension benefits in the hope that our children will calmly pick up the bill. This giant welfare-state Ponzi scheme is bound to collapse sometime – though you can be pretty sure that the politicians running it won’t end up in the slammer alongside Bernie Madoff. An ageing population means that all those benefits we vote ourselves today will be simply unaffordable tomorrow. You believe the national debt will top out at 100 percent of GDP?

Conservatives have long been strong on family. They believe that families are the glue that sticks us together, and that traditional nuclear families therefore plays an important role in sticking the whole nation together. As a libertarian, I believe that people should live as they choose. Too many young people of my parents' and grandparents' generations were forced into marriages that were or became deeply unhappy – but divorce was thought scandalous. So people – particularly women, who rarely had independent means or income enough to escape – endured that misery. Many, too, were humiliated, or prosecuted, for conducting relationships that we would happily accept today.

You can often achieve a lot more by doing things a bit at a time rather than attempting one bold and sweeping reform. In the 1970s, for example, the trade unions had extraordinary legal privileges; strike votes were done on a show of hands at works meetings (usually late at night when everyone except the Trotskyists had gone to bed); there weren’t even secret ballots for union elections. Edward Heath took the unions head on with his all-embracing Industrial Relations Act. It was a disaster: there were widespread demonstrations and strikes, and one of these confrontations forced him from office. Margaret Thatcher learnt from this and took things much more slowly.