Thursday 11 March 2010

UK jobs - let's do the math

The chief secretary to the treasury has just announced that they plan to reduce government spending by 38 billion pounds per year, by 2014. Let's assume that each government job corresponds to a spend of £35,000 (admittedly a bit of a wild guess). Now 38,000,000,000 divided by 35,000 is 1,085,714 or approximately one million. That's one heck of a lot of jobs to be found elsewhere in the economy!

1 comment:

  1. A general rule of thumb in business is that the actual cost of a job is at least 2x salary - factoring in employee taxes, the cost of providing buildings, computers, etc. It varies depending on capital/support/equipment requirements, and so can be considerably higher - viz an RAF fighter pilot for example.

    My strong suspicion is that a lot of that cut will come out of the military. We are just starting down the switchover to remote controlled/autonomous robotic warfare - the savings of rc drones over bombers for example are quite extraordinary.

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