Constantly Furious: suckling at the public teat

Graphs make everything easier to understand.

For instance, if someone told you that our woeful Labour government had massively increased - largely for their own benefit - the number of public sectors workers during the 12 years they've had their grubby little socialist fingers on the levers of power, you might find it hard to picture what 'massive' meant.

So here it is, in pictorial form. Feast your eyes:

Would you just look at that fucker. Oh dear.

The boffins over at Burning Our Money have been looking into the figures, and that graph is just the tip of a particularly revolting iceberg.

There are just over 6 million people working in the public sector, suckling on the public teat, according to the official figures.

However, that number doesn't include any of the staff in Higher Education, any GP's or anyone working for (or rather, in most cases, employed by) Network Rail, all of whom are clearly dependent on taxpayers cash to fill their paypackets. Add them in, and we're at 6.7 million.

Then you can add in all of those on welfare: they don't even have to go to work to paid by the taxpayer. And there's nearly 6 million of them.

Then there are those on the state pension. They deserve their pensions, they've worked for them, but they're still paid from the public purse. And there's 12.5 million of them.

So, in all, around 25 million people are paid directly from the pot that we fill up with the taxes we pay.

'We'? Yes, we who work in the private sector, the 'real' world. But there's only 22 million of us.

Yup, that's right. Every single worker in the private sector is being taxed to pay for someone else, plus a little bit more. The staff of every 100-strong company are being taxed to fund the lives of 113 other people. Dear God.

Pretty fucking scary stuff, eh?

But who should really be afraid? Well, if you're one of those 6.7 million public sectors workers or one of the 6 million 'on the welfare' and if you don't think that Gordon Brown's glorious reign over us is going to continue for another 5 years, and if you think that whoever inherits this godawful mess is going to have to take some pretty fucking drastic actions, pretty fucking sharpish, then...

Be afraid. Be very afraid...

Hat tip to BOM for the graph, and all that hard maths.