There are plenty of ways to generate money/ save money that the government should be exploring such as means testing benefits (initial increased bureaucracy yes), stripping huge chunks of waste out of the NHS, not replacing Trident, faster pullout of Iraq/Afghanistan, windfall taxes on thieving energy and oil companies, private companies taking over more services that the government provide, taxes on banks that pay excessive bonuses, those kind of things would make considerable inroads into the debt

Again, you've been told countless times - so few people above the proposed 'threshold' for means testing benefits claim them that the bureaucracy would cost more than the saving - so the next step is almost inevitably lowering the threshold and robbing families that actually need the benefits!

 

Trident being scrapped would be a good thing to do, but it isn't the silver bullet the Lib Dems have held it up as being - that is a £70 billion saving, but over 35 years. We would only save £2 billion a year.

We were puppets of Bush, whatever Bush did Blair would do so it was effectively Bush running this country so I would have said the same thing as Bush is a complete re****

 

Bush running the country? Sorry to pull you up on that, GWB was indirectly dictating part of our foreign policy, a far stretch from saying he was running the whole of the UK.

 

As for your earlier point, I'll rephrase it for everyone else: Cameron and Osborne are chancers well-drilled in PR who see an opportunity to get their favoured party back into power and take it. They have little regard for the country as a whole but want to keep their jobs and keep their friends happy. Relax, the Milibands will be here in a minute.

As the Financial Times' Martin Wolf, usually right-leaning, says:

 

"The single most effective way to bring the public finances back under control is [through] greater demand and higher GDP. This needs higher investment and net exports and more dynamic supply. Measures that seek to close the fiscal deficit, but destroy demand in doing so, will not help: fiscal austerity is just not enough."

Oh sweet jesus.

 

Craig, Craig, Craig. What Cameron and Osbourne are doing will KILL our country. THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. Anybody with an ounce of economic sense knows that the only way to get out of a recession is to spend our way out of it. The Australians completely hate debt and they understood that what K Rudd was doing was necessary to keep Australia afloat, but they are cutting because their economy is strong enough and at a level where it can cope with public expenditure being cut. The United Kingdom was about 5 years away from being in a position similar to where the Aussies are now, but f*** only knows how long it will be after the Tories are finished butchering our economy. Maybe we'll be at their post world crash levels in 10 years?

As the Financial Times' Martin Wolf, usually right-leaning, says:

 

"The single most effective way to bring the public finances back under control is [through] greater demand and higher GDP. This needs higher investment and net exports and more dynamic supply. Measures that seek to close the fiscal deficit, but destroy demand in doing so, will not help: fiscal austerity is just not enough."

 

The single best way to bring things under control is low taxes, tax cuts stimulate spending, tax cuts create jobs as more people see working as a viable option, tax cuts leaves more money in people's pockets to spend how they wish as opposed to Big Brother (government) spending the money for us.

 

Low taxes and sweeping tax cuts are not possible until the debt is under control and down to manageable levels (probably 3 years)

 

Tax cuts are the single most important issue for me and if a couple of years of economic difficulties is the way to make tax cuts viable then so be it

Oh sweet jesus.

 

Craig, Craig, Craig. What Cameron and Osbourne are doing will KILL our country. THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. Anybody with an ounce of economic sense knows that the only way to get out of a recession is to spend our way out of it. The Australians completely hate debt and they understood that what K Rudd was doing was necessary to keep Australia afloat, but they are cutting because their economy is strong enough and at a level where it can cope with public expenditure being cut. The United Kingdom was about 5 years away from being in a position similar to where the Aussies are now, but f*** only knows how long it will be after the Tories are finished butchering our economy. Maybe we'll be at their post world crash levels in 10 years?

 

I agreed with Rudd's idea of giving people money to spend in the High St, Brown should have done that instead of this 1p off a tin of beans crap that he bought in but Rudd was ultimately fired because he was as popular as Osama Bin Laden in a synagogue so while I liked a lot of his policies he was ultimately hated in Australia

K Rudd was ousted because of the various factions at play within the Labor party actually. Had K Rudd been in power at that election Labor would have held substantially more of their QLD seats giving them an outright victory.

K Rudd was ousted because he tried to put a small tax on the mineral wealth being harvested in Western Australia. It dented the polls (along with his reversal on climate change action), so Labor got scared and pushed him away for Gillard.

 

They'd have gained QLD seats but lost WA ones IIRC?

Rightly so, the last boundary review favoured Labour heavily plus there is a small chance that the voting system that the Lib Dems want will be won in the referrendum

It did on paper, but as Suedehead showed - in practice the amount of voters registered tended to be even across constituencies.

 

The two shouldn't be attached at all...

K Rudd was ousted because he tried to put a small tax on the mineral wealth being harvested in Western Australia. It dented the polls (along with his reversal on climate change action), so Labor got scared and pushed him away for Gillard.

 

They'd have gained QLD seats but lost WA ones IIRC?

Yeah, but there are more seats in QLD than in WA in the lower house. The Australian Labor party is made up of a lot of factions that didn't like the mining tax and some of the more powerful factions switched backing from K Rudd to Gillard. Their Labor party is pretty complicated :lol:

 

The population dispersal in Aus means the election is won and lost in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

A nice article on what we can expect given we're emulating the Irish response:

 

A year ago I wrote a post for Left Foot Forward on the Irish economy. I noted how, unlike Britain, the Irish Government had reacted to the global recession by cutting spending and attempting to drive down costs to remain globally competitive. I also noted this was broadly the policy pushed by the Conservatives at the time.

 

I assessed what had happened in the year between September 2008 and September 2009.

 

Nearly one year on, what has been the effect of these polices? Irish GDP is expected to fall by 12%, a staggering decline. Unemployment has reached 12.4% and is still rising. The economy is now in the grip of a severe deflation (minus 5.9%). Finance Minister Brian Lenihan openly talks of the need to “get our cost base down” in order to regain competitiveness. A policy of aiming to balance the budget and drive down wage costs is a throwback to the so-called Treasury View of the 1930s, a policy rejected then by progressives and rightly rejected now. The final irony is that, despite all of this needless suffering, the Irish Government will still be running a budget deficit of 12% of GDP this year while the ratings agencies have already cut Ireland’s sovereign bonds from AAA to AA.

 

In December last year, as Ireland delivered yet another emergency budget that was again praised by British Tories, I wrote an update.

 

Iain Dale writes that:

 

“The PBR the British Chancellor should have delivered, was delivered yesterday in Dublin. Hopefully George Osborne is studying it in great detail.”

 

The results of Ireland’s policy are plain to see:

 

• Irish unemployment is 12.5 per cent;

 

• The country is experiencing deflation at –6.6 per cent;

 

• GDP has fallen 7.4 per cent over the past year and 10.5% from its peak;

 

• And despite the cuts they have still had their credit rating downgraded.

 

But what exactly are the measures that the Tories are so keen to praise?

 

– Child benefit is being cut by 10%.

 

– Unemployment benefit is being cut by 4.1%, with larger cuts for those under 25.

 

– Public Sector workers are facing pay cuts of 5-8%.

 

– Prescription charges are being increased by 50%.

 

– Other increased health charges including A&E, inpatient and outpatient charges and a higher monthly threshold above which people cannot get free drugs under the Drug Payment Scheme.

 

– The Health budget is being cut by €400mn on top of previously announced cuts

 

– Further departmental cuts will be announced in coming days.

 

– €960mn is cut from the investment budget

 

So, a year after the first post and two years after Ireland embarked on its programme of cutting, where are we now?

 

Not in a good place. As the FT reports:

 

Ireland’s central bank governor has indicated that Brian Cowen’s government needs to go even further in cutting the forthcoming budget if it wants to restore international confidence in its management of the economy.

 

…

 

A year ago the populist Fianna Fáil-led coalition won international plaudits as one of the first EU countries to tackle the crisis head on, administering cuts in public sector pay averaging 15 per cent, and reductions in child and other benefits in the most savage budget in decades.

 

Yet today Ireland, together with Greece and Portugal, is seen as the most vulnerable of the EU’s peripheral economies, as it struggles with a property and banking crash that has blown a hole in the public finances and threatens the economic recovery.

 

As Ireland prepares to engage in (another) round of cuts, Bloomberg reports how unconvinced “the markets” are by Irish policy.

 

Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed say Ireland is likely to default, more than double the rate three months ago, according to a quarterly poll of 1,408 investors, traders and analysts.

 

Ireland is providing a vivid example that the “cuts don’t work”. As the head of asset allocation at Credit Suisse Private Bank warned a year ago

 

Spending cuts to be announced today by Finance Minister Brian Lenihan may end up sacrificing long-term economic growth for reducing the budget deficit, an Irish author and head of asset allocation at Credit Suisse Private Banking has warned.

 

Michael O’Sullivan, whose book, ‘Ireland and the Global Question’, was published in 2006, warned this week that Mr Lenihan’s expected swingeing cuts could do long-term damage. “Arguably the Irish bond market is being saved at the expense of Irish society”, said Mr O’Sullivan.

 

“By cutting spending you lower the trend line of growth and store up bigger fiscal problems down the line,” he added.

 

Cutting now reduces growth and tax revenue and increases unemployment and welfare spending. It does not close the deficit in a sustainable manner.

 

Ireland, a euro member, may have little choice but to pursue this policy. The UK though does face a choice, and we are making the wrong one.

 

Before Craig responds as I know he will, the fact that Ireland is a Euro nation and as such has to go along with 1% interest rates rather than 0.5% interest rates is not on its own responsible for a 12% loss of GDP. I'd be shocked if it were responsible for a 1% loss of GDP.

 

Also note that Ireland's cuts are still smaller than ours are forecast to be!

Further proof that Cameron/Osbourne are crippling the British economy.

A nice article on what we can expect given we're emulating the Irish response:

Before Craig responds as I know he will, the fact that Ireland is a Euro nation and as such has to go along with 1% interest rates rather than 0.5% interest rates is not on its own responsible for a 12% loss of GDP. I'd be shocked if it were responsible for a 1% loss of GDP.

 

Also note that Ireland's cuts are still smaller than ours are forecast to be!

 

We were a much more powerful economy than Ireland to start off with so we are starting from a much higher base than them plus we have a far more massive population, to have comparable unemployment to Ireland we will have to have over 4.5m unemployed and that simply isn't going to happen, even under the extremes of Maggie and Major it barely went over 3m, we are also one of the global centres in the world for IT and banking so again we have an economic infrastructure that can withstand stuff way more than Ireland can

 

Nothing like what has happened in Ireland will happen here

We were a much more powerful economy than Ireland to start off with so we are starting from a much higher base than them plus we have a far more massive population, to have comparable unemployment to Ireland we will have to have over 4.5m unemployed and that simply isn't going to happen, even under the extremes of Maggie and Major it barely went over 3m, we are also one of the global centres in the world for IT and banking so again we have an economic infrastructure that can withstand stuff way more than Ireland can

 

Nothing like what has happened in Ireland will happen here

Under the extremes of Maggie and Major? Over Maggie's reign, government spending increased by 1% in real terms. The current government are proposing an approximate 25% decrease.

 

We're one of the global centres of the world for IT and banking, but last time I checked they didn't employ 35 million people.

The Irish example, along with the Japanese example in the 90s, shows that cuts on this scale when the economy is struggling not only increase unemployment and bring down growth, they don't even achieve the stated aim of bringing down the deficit. The ONLY times that fiscal retrenchment on anything like this scale in recent history has succeeded is when the global economy has been strong. For instance, Canada in the mid-90s managed to implement a successful austerity programme because they had strong trade with the booming States to fall back on. Thatcher's government managed to be somewhat successful at bringing borrowing down with her far less severe programme of cuts thanks to the exports from the North Sea oil stocks with a strong global economy. Right now, no-one in their right mind could say the global economy is booming, and in any case, we have NOTHING to export.

 

It's one of the basics of economics that, to have growth, you need atleast one of three following: government needs to be spending; banks need to be lending; or foreign nations need to be buying from you. The government is doing absolutely nothing to boost either of those three factors.

Under the extremes of Maggie and Major? Over Maggie's reign, government spending increased by 1% in real terms. The current government are proposing an approximate 25% decrease.

 

We're one of the global centres of the world for IT and banking, but last time I checked they didn't employ 35 million people.

 

I meant the extremes in terms of levels of unemployment not spending, we had 3m under Maggie at its peak and about the same under Major at its peak

I meant the extremes in terms of levels of unemployment not spending, we had 3m under Maggie at its peak and about the same under Major at its peak

You don't think one is going to affect the other?!

You don't think one is going to affect the other?!

 

Unemployment is bound to go up but there is little or no chance IMHO of reaching the 3m that was reached under Maggie and I think Major too

 

I think that the Greece and Ireland doomsday scenarios that are being talked on here are highly unlikely to happen in this country even if there is some tough times ahead

Unemployment is bound to go up but there is little or no chance IMHO of reaching the 3m that was reached under Maggie and I think Major too

 

I think that the Greece and Ireland doomsday scenarios that are being talked on here are highly unlikely to happen in this country even if there is some tough times ahead

Why do you think there's little or no chance of reaching the 3 million? It's currently at 2.47 million, and that's before cuts in the public sector have even begun!

Why do you think there's little or no chance of reaching the 3 million? It's currently at 2.47 million, and that's before cuts in the public sector have even begun!

 

Because jobs will continue to be created, so even if say worst case 750,000 public sector workers lose their jobs I think enough jobs will be created in the private sector that will IMHO have unemployment max out at about 2.8m