Giving people money costs money
I’m glad to see that the cost estimates for beneficiaries released yesterday have become boring and aren’t featured news (at least on the online media sites, I haven’t checked the squashed-tree versions). If you’re planning to spend money getting people off benefits, it’s only financially worth doing so if you don’t spend a lot more than their benefits would have cost, so you need some idea of what that is.
I had looked briefly at a similar estimate of the cost of Parliament members. It works about to about $1 million each per year: if you add up the parts of budget Votes for the Parliamentary Counsel, Parliamentary Service, and Prime Minister and Cabinet that aren’t capital expenditure (and take off the cost of printing and distributing Parliament documents to the public) and divide by the number of MPs. To get a lifetime cost you’d need data on the distribution of time in office, which looked like it would take more than ten minutes to come up with.
We need a Parliament, and we need support for people who can’t support themselves. Aggregate costs are a useful input to calculations, but as isolated headlines they’re not helpful. They fail to address the basic question about any number: compared to what?
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The administrative costs are always costy… The cost for the government’s saving plan is much more expensive than the amount they will save actually.
12 years ago