Budget for south africa... and many other developing nations.

[Charlatan]

South africa is nearly a third world country. I bet i can better the state of affairs here with minimal work, as i just did in my job creation thread with america, by simply tapping into welfare, and maybe some other sources. Who needs a military if you listen to your own people today? What good is education without jobs - you would rather not know how to write and have a job, yes?

The total budget for 2008/9 was R716 billion. Of this amount R55 billion was allocated for
debt.

Okay so we have 700 000 000 000 for the total budget. Let's say we were to scrap welfare, or just give it in grants to the disabled or something, and then see where we stand?

Social welfare at 15% is the second biggest part of government expenditure. Welfare includes
all the social grants, old age pensions and poverty relief work of government. Over the last 9
years, the number of people who get social grants has grown from just over 3 million to over
12 million. That is about one quarter of the people in South Africa.

How do you get this right? One quarter of the people in south africa are unable to work?

Anyway, if we take ten percent of the seven hundred billion, we are left with one hundred billion, allowing for lee way. If there are fifty million people in south africa, and they need two thousand rand a month to live on, and 13 000 000 people need this, that means they need 30 000 000 000, or thirty billion. That leaves us with fourty billion to play with to create jobs and get people off the damn welfare! over a year that climbs to 300 billion though, so somewhere the stats are wrong!

If you, from scratch, were to build factories for the people, how much could you build with one hundred billion rand? If it costs you one million to build a factory or farm or whatever, then ten thousand factories and farms, each employing a hundred people, comes to 10 million people employed. The rate of unemployment is about twenty million in south africa, so this over two years could alleviate the problem completely, allowing for more taxation and a bigger gdp.

I am sure it is the same in the rest of the third world. Cut welfare and place that money into jobs creation is what i say.

[Yarn]

That sounds like a good idea. You could also try making it so that your presidents have to take an oath stating that they realize that taking a shower after fucking someone with aids will not prevent you from becoming infected. I think that would've disqualified one of them and by that fact alone I am going to take a wild guess and say he was horrible.

The problem with South Africa is partly to do with corruption and irrational regulations. I remember, and i'm not saying this specific example applies to South Africa, though it might, that in this one African country, they put price controls on electricity that made it so they have no consistent electricity because it wasn't profitable to provide it because the price control was so low. Students had to go to the airport to read at night, because it was the only place that still had its lights on.

South Africa would probably do best to model itself after developing countries like Brazil, China, and India. They have been very successful in growing during the past decade, and as their cheap labor gets exhausted, investors are going to look for the next countries to build into megaexporters. Of course, if people are on welfare, they might prefer to just sit on their asses rather than take those jobs.

The best jobs require degrees though, so education is extremely important. You can employ people making stuff in factories, but unless that factory work is highly skilled, they will work very hard and make very little money. Every sizable developed nation however went through a phase where everyone had really shitty jobs making very little money in factories, so i'm not sure you can skip that step. What eventually happened and happens is that once they run out of people to do the shitty jobs, the factories have to start raising wages to compete for the workers because at that point there aren't enough workers to go around. After that goes on for a while, a country goes from being third world to first world. Taiwan and South Korea are the most recent countries to do this. 30-40 years ago, they were third world. Now they are first world. China probably would be to if it wasn't so freakin large-that slows things down.

Of course, nowadays, if one country runs out of cheap labor, companies may just move to another, so it could be more difficult now then it used to be.

[Charlatan]

That sounds like a good idea. You could also try making it so that your presidents have to take an oath stating that they realize that taking a shower after fucking someone with aids will not prevent you from becoming infected. I think that would've disqualified one of them and by the fact alone I am going to take a wild guess and say he was horrible.

The problem with South Africa is partly to do with corruption and irrational regulations. I remember, and i'm not saying this specific example applies to South Africa, though it might, that in this one African country, they put price controls on electricity that made it so they have no consistent electricity because it wasn't profitable to provide it because the price control was so low. Students had to go to the airport to read at night, because it was the only place that still had its lights on.

South Africa would probably do best to model itself after developing countries like Brazil, China, and India. They have been very successful in growing during the past decade, and as their cheap labor gets eaten, investors are going to look for the next countries to build into megaexporters. Of course, if people are on welfare, they might prefer to just sit on their asses rather than take those jobs.

The best jobs require degrees though, so education is extremely important. You can employ people making stuff in factories, but unless that factory work is highly skilled, they will work very hard and make very little money.

Yes we still have that president. The cartoonists and satirists draw him with a shower head on his head all the time.

Electricity here is stolen. Illegal lines come from the real ones to shanties and then they watch tv at shebeens. Water for the squatters is free - they jusy let the tap run all day and night for thier daily chores.

Modelling south africa after brazil and china is also a good idea. I wonder how quickly the third world could reduce it's debts by employing all the people, or, as many as they can?

[Yarn]

That is comically depressing.

I don't know about debts. I will say this. Apparently, you are already wealthier than China per capita, so you wouldn't have to climb as far to become first world. It sort of sounds like your citizenly just wants to live comfortably in stagnantion. Or maybe it is decay-that would be worse.

But if you could get your act together do everything just right, then, if you managed to be as fast as Taiwan was, I suppose it would take you about 40 years to become as wealthy Europe, or less because Taiwan started out poorer than you are now. Becoming wealthy as a wealthy part of Europe takes longer, but apparently Taiwan has caught up with Germany now=very impressive.
Taiwan Miracle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They call it the Taiwan Miracle, although the same sort of thing happened in several Asian countries. And it happened in Japan long before it did in the others. The Japs were wealthy and advanced enough so early that in 1904 they got into a war with Russia and kicked its ass.

If I understand it correctly, the white part of your country already is first world. So if you could just expand whatever it is doing to productively employ in similar fashion the black and mixed folks, maybe you could develop faster than you could via the sweatshop model. The key is to not let that first world portion of your country go, and to expand it to encompass everything. If that is possible.

[Charlatan]

Education...

Education is the biggest item in the budget and it makes up 17% (one sixth) of the pie. We
spend a lot on education because we are still paying for some of the backlogs from the past.
Many of our schools still need classrooms, toilets, sports fields and equipment. Salaries of
teachers make up about three quarters of the education budget. We have a large proportion
of young people in South Africa - around one third of our people are children.

Okay, so this takes up 17% of the budget, which comes to about, allowing for lee way, one hundred billion. This means, with a third of our nation in schools, being less than, but we will say it is equal to seventeen million, educating each child costs [100 000 000 000 / 17 000 000 =] ten thousand rand a month to educate - more or less 1250 dollars a year. This includes teachers salaries, at about one teacher to fourty children, means there are 425000 teachers, each hauling about ten grand a month, comes to about 51 000 000 000 a year spent on teachers. so, it is costing half of the expenditure to teach the children, so each child costs five thousand rand a year to educate - 5125 dollars a year.

Now, if you were to build from the bottom up, what would the costs be? If each child gets textbooks for a total of two hundred rand a book, and there are say ten subjects - lee way - that comes to two thousand rand per child. computers are a once off thing so don't go there! This means that somewhere there is a child claiming 5000 rand but only using 2000 rand.

But then there is the behind the scenes work going on. that is a pittance i bet!

So, my budget for south african education comes to 70 billion, while thiers comes to more than a hundred billion. That is thirty billion that could be used for jobs!

[Charlatan]

Health takes up 11% - more than one tenth of our budget. The government health budget
pays for free health care for children and pensioners, as well as for unemployed people. With
almost half the people in South Africa living under the poverty line and almost 20% of adults
HIV posi ti ve, state heal th plays a very important role.

If seventy billion rand is being spent on health care, and doctors earn 20 000 rand a month, then that comes to, with there being nurses four hundred nurses and eighty doctors for every hundred thousand people - 50 million people means there are 200 000 nurses and 40 000 doctors. This comes to, lets say the nurses get paid ten thousand rand a month, 2 000 000 for nurses a month, 240 000 000 rand for nurses a year, and 800 000 000. this comes to about one and a half billion for the staff. Out of seventy billion?

Just how much do medicines cost? I think i found another thing to slash away for job creation!

[Yarn]

Now, if you were to build from the bottom up, what would the costs be? If each child gets textbooks for a total of two hundred rand a book, and there are say ten subjects - lee way - that comes to two thousand rand per child. computers are a once off thing so don't go there! This means that somewhere there is a child claiming 5000 rand but only using 2000 rand.

Computers are not a one off thing. They break and become obselete. It is true you don't have to replace every computer you have every year, but you do have to replace some of them every year, hence computers are a yearly expense. As is all the other equipment (photoprojectors, desks, writing utensils, calculators, toilets, lights, sports equipment, uniforms, etc etc) and even the buildings themselves ocassionally have to be replaced. In my hometown, we had to build a new high school because the old one was 50 years old and was falling apart. The new high school cost millions of dollars. It probably would've been cheaper in South Africa, but buildings are a big expense. On otherhand, US public schools reuse their textbooks, so we don't have to buy new ones every year, although they also are eventually replaced as old ones get worn out and obselete.

Also, South Africa's population is booming. That means that not only do you have to replace stuff that breaks or is too old, you also have to expand the total amount of stuff you have every year in order to service the greater number of children. This means new buildings, new computers, new textbooks, desks, etc: new everything.

This doesn't mean you can't save some money without losing quality, but it does mean it is a complicated matter to determine just how much money you need and from that deduce how much money is being wasted. You'd might be better off finding waste by looking for it directly rather than infering its scope from the size of the whole budget.

[Yarn]

Just how much do medicines cost

Depends on the country, but they cost a lot.

And the machines, christ machines are very expensive. It is like funding a bloated University physics department. In fact, that's where a lot of this stuff came from. The underlying science of MRIs was deduced by astrophysicists studying outerspace. A single MRI machine can cost millions of dollars (the lower quality ones cost several hundred thousand). X-ray therapy machines, which are used to wipe out cancers by precise firing of radiation cost $3 million. An even newer machine, which is said to be safer, does the same thing by shooting a concentrated proton beam. In fact, it is basically a 220 ton particle accelerator. It costs, wait for it, $150 million.

Now, that stuff is extreme. A lot of it is new, although MRIs aren't thaat new, and prices go down a lot over time. But, even stuff as oldschool as ultrasounds can be expensive. Per instance, a top of the line ultrasound machine costs about $100,000 now.

So, i'm not saying it is necessary to have a 220 ton particle accelerator in every or even any South African hospital, at least not until the price comes down, but the point is, medical equipment is not cheap.

[Charlatan]

We are talking about discrepensies of billions here yarn. To employ the people to do the dotors work comes to less than two billion rands a year. this means each citizen takes 1200 rand a year to keep healthy. That is not a lot, but how often do people get sick?

68 billion on miedicine? That treanslates to 8 and a half billion dollars on medicines and machines for 50 million people. Does that sound right to you?

[Yarn]

Yes. That assumes only several hundred dollars per person. A single container of pills that lasts a month or so can easily cost 50-100 dollars if the patent for the pills hasn't expired yet. I am sure pills are cheaper in South Africa than in the US, but there are many people who have to take pills that are that expensive for their entire lives, for decades. But we aren't just talking about pharmecuticals, we are talking about all the crazy machines I mentioned. New ones keep coming out, South Africa's population is exploding meaning capacity has to continually expand, and old machines break. The machines are incredibly expensive, as are buildings, as is medicine. And all of these things are essential to quality care.

In particular, AIDs medicine is very expensive because so much of it is new, meaning the patents haven't expired so there aren't generics. South Africa is a young country, but AIDs doesn't discriminate on the basis of age, and South Africa has a huge AIDs problem.

More than 13% of your country has AIDs:
http://www.avert.org/south-africa-hi...statistics.htm

That is an extremely expensive problem.

As I said, you'd be better off looking for waste directly rather than trying to infer its existence.

One thing I think have identified however is that solving that AIDs problem would save you a ton of money. Not just on medicine, but on human resources. What is the economic benefit of raising a child, educating a child for more than 15 years, teaching people to do jobs, just to have them drop dead from AIDs as young adults?

[Charlatan]

Yes. That assumes only several hundred dollars per person. A single container of pills that lasts a month or so can easily cost 50-100 dollars if the patent for the pills hasn't expired yet. I am sure pills are cheaper in South Africa than in the US, but there are many people who have to take pills that are that expensive for their entire lives, for decades. But we aren't just talking about pharmecuticals, we are talking about all the crazy machines I mentioned. New ones keep coming out, South Africa's population is exploding meaning capacity has to continually expand, and old machines break. The machines are incredibly expensive, as are buildings, as is medicine. And all of these things are essential to quality care.

In particular, AIDs medicine is very expensive because so much of it is new, meaning the patents haven't expired so there aren't generics. South Africa is a young country, but AIDs doesn't discriminate on the basis of age, and South Africa has a huge AIDs problem.

More than 13% of your country has AIDs:
South Africa HIV & AIDS Statistics

That is an extremely expensive problem.

As I said, you'd be better off looking for waste directly rather than trying to infer its existence.

One thing I think have identified however is that solving that AIDs problem would save you a ton of money. Not just on medicine, but on human resources. What is the economic benefit of raising a child, educating a child for more than 15 years, teaching people to do jobs, just to have them drop dead from AIDs as young adults?

Well, let's do the math for health care in south africa? Let's start with aids? That is ten million people comes to 6800 rand per person. That is 300 dollars per person. for a year that is 24 000 000 000 rand for aids.

By the middle of 2001, triple combination therapy was available from Indian generic manufacturers for as little as $295 per person per year.

AIDS, Drug Prices and Generic Drugs

sp far we have used 3 billion rand for staff, and 24 billion for hiv. now we are down to, say, 43 billion for medical equipment and generic drugs - operations are free because you just pay the doctor or hosiptal on the poverty line.

Now, there is a thing called medical aid that we have in south africa. it is where you pay a membership to a scheme and recieve medicine for free. Let's say that frees up the middle and upper class, and saves us a mere 2 billion rand. now we have 45 billion to pay for equipment and prescription drugs.

Ordinary TB treatment costs about R310 (in 2002)

Karabo - Treatment

Now there are thirty million people needing - lets say that all have turberculosis - 600 rand each, would come to 18 billion - let's say it is 20 billion rand? This leaves us with 25 billion rand to pay on machines! That comes to 3 billion dollars for machines.

But wait, i found another link on google...

In 2011, total spend on health was R248.6-billion – or around 8.3% of GDP

so now we got like three times or more to spend on health care. There is something very wrong here! I made a rational sounding budget with just a third of that amount! Sounds like there is money that can be spent on job creation.

*I like to examine the budgets in place than looking for waste - looking for waste comes through this!

[Charlatan]

Please remember that the exchange rate nets eight rand for every dollar. maybe i should have said that in the beginning?