Billion pound challenge

One of the ways industry can help our economy come out of recession is to get more people into work, and then reduce our massive deficit from the tax revenues raised and reduction in state benefits paid out.

I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to work that out!

If someone is unemployed, they are unlikely to see a job advertised and think I won’t apply because I’ll pay too much tax. So if taxes need to be raised to balance the books the logical thing to do would be to increase VAT and to increase PAYE tax.

However, politicians of all persuasions seem to be spineless and only interested in short term votes rather than the long terms well being of our economy.

They have proved that by increasing Employers NIC. All that will do is stop employers employing people at source. I  run a small business so only have 6 translation job vacancies at the moment.

What the country needs is a radical policy and approach to balance the books and get people back to work:

• Cut Employers NIC to 5%, massively encouraging employers to take on staff
• Force Employers to contribute 3% to employees stakeholder pensions
• Raise employees NIC by 3%
• Raise PAYE tax rates by 4%
• Raise VAT to 20%

Forget this rubbish about dramatically cutting Public Sector Jobs, in general Public Sector money is spent internally in the UK on jobs and big internally spent capital projects. By cutting this back, laying off staff and ineffect putting more money into all our pockets will just result in a huge proportion of that money flowing out of the country into foreign holidays and chinese goods.

It might not gain votes but it would get us out of the mess we are in as a country much much faster than the populist burying heads in the sand policies of the national political parties!

Sometimes taking on too much is worse than the status quo.

We would really like to take a stand at Internet World to showcase Ben’s new Digital Media Agency, www.askdigitalmedia.co.uk as well as our own and some partner white labelled services.

However, this is the week after Business StartUp, and only 5 weeks away, so we have to weigh up whether we have the resources and time at present to make the impact we would like to make.

Although it looks like a fantastic event, we don’t want the impact we make at any event to be anything other than the wow factor. We will therefore leave this event until 2009, where we can have a planned stand and campaign that will guarantee us results.

And although I am trying to turn us into a global player, it is definitely not “money no object”, but with everything carefully costed and to a budget.

Rather than exhibit as a new player we will be exhibiting in 2009 hopefully as a major and successful player.