ANOTHER year, another big, scary and depressing set of numbers from the Social Security department.

It’s tempting, at times, to think about the department in precisely those terms – a big, scary and depressing machine that sits in La Motte Street spewing out big, scary and depressing numbers – like a huge version of Eeyore from the Winnie the Pooh books, if Eeyore kept going on about your life expectancy and what a massive problem it is that people are living longer.

Anyway. The particular number that got me this time wasn’t about life expectancy, or the date that the Social Security fund is going to run dry, or how many years we’re all going to have to work or anything else (although it’s worth repeating my thanks to Social Security Minister Ian Gorst for giving his colleagues something new to talk about).

It wasn’t any of those things. It was this: the Social Security Fund paid out £132m in 2009. That’s a lot of money. Well, it gets bigger.

Gross spending by States departments is budgeted to hit £768m this year, according to the most recent Business Plan – add that figure to the most recent figure for combined spending from the Health Insurance and Social Security funds (£195m) and the capital spending budget (£38m) and…

And you arrive at the surprising notion that public spending will top £1bn this year.
That’s £1bn. That’s a proper jumbo-sized number. It works out at more than £10,000 spent for every man, woman and child in Jersey.

And yet…it sounds like a lot when you put it like that, but when you think about health costs, the costs of education, and keeping the roads, benefit systems and police force going, it doesn’t seem quite so outlandish.

There isn’t a particular point to this – it certainly doesn’t seem to me like a wildly unreasonable figure if you think about everything that a government needs to do, but it’s a milestone worth recording. Strange that no one mentioned it, isn’t it?

ALL that seems a bit heavy, but light relief and food for thought combined last week in the mental salad that was Kevin Keen’s proposal for an exam for would-be politicians.

The former Chamber of Commerce president’s proposals, in case you missed them in the letters page, were for a test on economics and Island history to be given to anyone who wants to stand for the States in October – to which, from long and bitter personal experience, I would add tests on basic numeracy, literacy, and pronunciation, a full psychological evaluation, and a separate quiz on ‘knowing when to sit down and shut up’.

In an email later in the week, Mr Keen admitted that there was one single problem with his otherwise perfect plan.
His question: ‘What would the pass rate be and would we need Freedom of Information legislation to get the results?’
Bravo.

And as hard as it gets, from time to time, to imagine a worse job than my own, there are moments where things slot into perspective and I have to accept that there are some people who have it worse. Well, not people as such, more like one person.

To be specific, a person called Freddie Cohen. Sympathy is, of course, entirely out of the question. He’s got the job of Environment Minister because he wants it (insert your own joke about his mental equilibrium here) and because he stood for election on a specific platform of chasing it.

But there was a moment last week when the Portelet stuff was flying around and I thought, wow, wouldn’t want to be that guy, taking the flak for a development he couldn’t turn down, in a place where no one wants any buildings ever.
Then I remembered he was just a politician, and it all stopped mattering quite so much.

Finally, school fees. Having been astonished by the strange logic applied by some of Education Minister James Reed’s ministerial colleagues to his proposals to reduce the taxpayer subsidy to fee-paying schools (the line was that it had been ‘badly handled’ – as if it was news that could have been handled well…), it’s time now to be surprised by the all new compromise coming out of the Education department.
Drumroll…it’s doing exactly the same thing, to exactly the same people, over five years instead of three.

If this was the deal that was meant to save all the wailing and grinding of teeth over school fees, I suspect that it’s not going to cut much ice.