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David, Do you not see that you are effectively supporting dictatorship - the people must take what 'the State', in these terms an autonymous body of those least likely to be badly affected by the policies they impose on the people, whom they oblige to pay for them?
People probably agree that there needs to be 'a lot of hard belt tightening', but in what is claimed to be a democracy, it is for the people to decide whose belts should be tightened and how hard, so that those most responsible for our predicament would have to make several more holes in them and FEEL even worse off than the poorest, even though they still would not be.
The people, though we are not a pacifist nation, might well decide, after the fortune (and lives) we have squandered in repeated un- or counter-productive overseas military adventures, might decide that, rather than 'The NHS, schools, etc etc' being foremost candidates for shouldering the burden, the Armed forces should be reduced to a size sufficient only for our own needs, and then go through the heads of expenditure from greatest to least, and decide what THEIR priorities were for what their taxes should/not be spent on.