I don't always agree with Will Hutton. On this he was spot on, today:
According to the IFS, 88% of the planned spending cuts lie ahead over the next four years — a scale of continual spending reduction never contemplated nor delivered in our history. Public provision of everything is to be emasculated, with welfare in the front line. We now also learn that public sector pay in the regions, a last prop for many local economies, is also in the frame. Despite all this, and despite a darkening international economic situation as oil prices rise, the Office for Budget Responsibility blithely forecasts that business investment is to climb by 40%, the largest increase since the war. It is a ship of fools with the deluded at the helm.
A ship of fools with the deluded at the helm is exactly what we have.
The trouble is the ship's crew is made up of Tories, most Lib Dems, Purple Labour and maybe more.
That's the really scary bit.
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“He might just as well as sacrifice virgins.”
I love that comment, must remember to use it.
What must we do to get a credible opposition to express and highlight these issues – it’s almost too late!
Yeah, but should we fight it ?
Our prosperity was horrible. All about house price inflation & PR idiots being lauded. People with the IQ of a cow being idolised by those with the morality of a rat. Maybe we need some poverty in this country to look around & learn that we need to be more like Germany.
The Germans don’t have house price booms, don’t have a financial sector that demands a stupid return from manufacturing. The German’s response to the libertarian financiers was ” F off, get back in your box !”
Really? So whose were all those banks that bought huge amounts of American CDOs then went cap in hand to the German federal and state governments to bail them out – oh, and the Fed as well? http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,536635,00.html
And whose were those banks that lent stupid amounts to Greece, then went cap in hand to the ECB to bail them out? http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-06-06/german-banks-top-french-on-23-billion-greek-debt-bis-says.html
Wish it was so. Ok, Germany is not quite so finance friendly as the UK or US, but still, our bankers are no better than anywhere else. Even worse, our parliament is just about to sell our souls to the ESM once and for all. Be glad if you are outside the Euro Zone, this ESM monster is bound to lead to desaster eventually.
The German difference was not the absence of banks – some of the world’s largest and most aggressive are in Germany. No, the difference is the proportion of the economy devoted to banking and associated casinos. In the UK economy it was almost the whole economy. Germany on the other hand carried on making and doing.
Their reward? Bailing out the Greeks, Spanish and Italians….
I am sorry – that’s wrong
Germany is not bailing out those places
it is bailing out its incompetent banks who lent to those places because they bought dud product from the likes of Goldman Sachs who repackaged the debts of such places
Maybe Germany needed better bankers
Richard, just wondering with all these spending cuts, is Defence spending also affected? Conservatives in Australia and the U.S. usually treat this as the sacred cow. It’s like “by all means let’s have endless wars (we have to keep our ‘buddies’ in business after all), but let the masses back home look after themselves”.
We are having substantial spending cuts
Let’s see:
One carrier, no planes
Another carrier maybe: No planes
Tens of thousands of troop cuts.
An aircraft not fit for any purpose (typhoon) and hideously expensive (better just buying from the US)
Anyway, zerohedge is a bit more scathing:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/things-make-you-go-hmmm-such-fiscally-credible-uk-and-its-upcoming-100-year-gilts
Is that the same Will Hutton, Jounalist, Author, ex BBC and Educationalist?
Just what we want, another non Industrialist, never got their hands dirty,
telling us they know everything.
[…] Well, indeed. This isn’t a new argument, but this does look a little bit like a consensus of the sensible emerging. There seems to be no real argument here – corporate tax cuts are a really, really foolish idea right now: exactly the wrong way to go. The UK, for instance, seems to be run by a ship of fools, with the deluded at the helm. […]
This articled by Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at one of my local universities, The University of Sheffield, is worth a read, especially in the context of this latest opinion poll
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/most-voters-see-tories-as-the-party-of-the-rich-7586360.html
“Supporters of the so-called Laffer Curve, based on the notion that high earners will work less as tax rates go up, argue that this is indeed the case. A lower rate of tax has induced more effort, more income and so more tax revenues.
Or is it more simply that the very rich now take home such huge salaries and bonuses for doing no more than they did 30 years ago that explains the increase in the tax they pay?
This is the conclusion reached by Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield in a paper published today by IPPR: The Case for Austerity among the Rich.
Over the last 30 years, pre-tax income inequality in the UK has increased, as it has in most advanced countries, to reach levels last seen in the 1920s. And it has been massive rises in the incomes of those right at the very top of the income scale that have caused this increase in inequality.
In 1997, the average income of someone in the top 0.1% of earners in the UK was almost £650,000, or 61 times the average for those in the bottom 90% of the income distribution. By 2007, this had risen to almost £1,200,000 (a gain of 82%) and was now 95 times the average of the bottom 90%.
This happened because the CEOs of the UK’s largest companies and the small group of people that make up their boards and remuneration committees colluded to push up pay of top executives and the rents that were being extracted from the rest of the economy by the financial sector soared.
In his paper, Dorling argues that it is a myth that reducing the taxes on the very rich has somehow made the bulk of the population better off and suggests that a little more austerity among the rich would be an appropriate response to the current economic and fiscal crisis.
True, sales of luxury cars, the receipts of boarding schools and the profits of Michelin-starred restaurants would be lower as a result, as would house prices in the fashionable parts of London. But the impact on the bulk of the population would be negligible.
More austerity among the rich would, Dorling suggests, make it possible to lessen the scale of public spending cuts. He points out that by 2015, according to IMF forecasts, the UK will have a lower ratio of public spending to GDP than the United States and 14 other western EU countries.
And the danger of not acting is to entrench income and wealth gaps in the UK that are greater than at any point in living memory and greater than in almost all similarly wealthy countries. This could be expected to lead to high and rising levels of crime, social disorder, dysfunction and rising polarisation, fear and anxiety. Not a country happy with itself or pleasant to live in — except for the very rich isolated in their enclaves.
It is in this context that the Chancellor’s decision to cut the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p should be seen — though it is not in fact the main issue. The bigger concern should be the huge disparity that has grown up in pre-tax incomes. The case for austerity among the rich is not about a return to the punitive tax rates of the 1970s; it is about reversing the 30-year trends to greater inequality in wages and salaries.”
http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2012/03/rich-austerity_Mar2012_8917.pdf