Britain’s defense and health secretaries are demanding budget increases. These requests are justified, but any new funds should be offset with other government cuts. Preferably, from cuts to the U.K.’s vast welfare budget.
Britain spends 2 percent of its GDP on defense spending every year, and many conservatives are now calling for a boost to 2.5 percent. At around $10 billion in additional funds, the spending hike would allow Britain to purchase more advanced capabilities such as F-35 strike fighters, attack and ballistic missile submarines, and new air defense capabilities.
Britain’s public health service, the National Health Service, is also creaking as it grapples with an aging population and more expensive treatment options. While the NHS is long overdue for structural reforms and personal responsibility caveats, it does need new spending.
The question is where this money should come from?
One option is to use the unexpected that Britain’s chancellor (its budget chief) has just found. The chancellor says the budget deficit may $14 billion lower in the coming year than previously expected.
But I think there’s a better option here: Britain should embrace the smaller deficit, and instead pay for health and defense hikes by cutting spending elsewhere.
It’s not that complicated.
Were Britain willing to engage in a tougher assessment and eligibility process for access to benefits such as housing, disability, and wage support, it could quite easily find at least $20 billion to 30 billion a year. I say easily because the welfare budget currently stands at around $360 billion and is rife with waste.
More than that, the welfare system actually encourages dependency by discouraging work and personal responsibility.
Yet, by reallocating money from welfare to health, the conservative government could make the case that its policy change is moral: bolstering, for example, top public priorities such as social care, so that those who need living assistance can find it in better quality.
While these changes won’t play well on the left of British politics, conservative and centrist voters would welcome the new money in health spending and already, albeit quietly, accept the need to address welfare waste.
On defense, the public is also now more predisposed to budget increases. After all, in light of a rising Russian threat in the air proximate to British skies, on the European continent, in cyberspace, and now on British streets, there is an increasing public awareness that Britain’s deterrent-defeat potency needs improvement.
Ultimately, Americans should also pay close heed to this debate.
While we don’t have public health and welfare budgets anywhere near as large as Britain’s, we do face rising costs in Medicare and a Democratic Party that wants dramatically increased domestic spending. At the margin, this money needs to come from somewhere. And Britain offers an example as to the hard personal and national costs that constant spending increases pose over time.
