the Austerity Con or Con

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

just read this, which reads as common sense but then ....?

[johnb]

One of the problems is that most of the discussion of deficit vs austerity is done in simplistic, even adversarial, terms.

From almost complete ignorance, I see a number of factors:

1) If you don't tackle the deficit there are major problems

2) You need growth to tackle the deficit. Just cutting expenditure will never work.

3) There is a balancing act to perform between the extent and timing of expenditure cuts and expenditure to stimulate growth.

If you over do the expenditure cuts and under do the growth stimulation you enter a downwards economic spiral. However, if you invest too much in growth whilst not getting the deficit under control you go bust.

[teamsaint]

The first thing that needs dealing with are the lies perpetrated by politicians.

Public spending under labour was at historically normal levels till the banks demanded that we prop them up. This is a fact, despite what a lot of people would have us believe. For most of recent history, around 40% of GDP was spent on the public sector....and this seems to be, broadly, a level that works.

"Austerity" is a weapon in what is, to all intents and purposes, a class war. ("Oh there you go again bringing class into it").
As somebody else said, these days its capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich and the corporate sector.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

yes but i suspect with gloom aforethought that not propping the banks up would have been even more dire of consequence than the billions we poured down their squeaky beaks ...

the pursuit of the small state is one thing, a political choice ... i am convinced that we are set on this under the guise of austerity and the common sense of deficit reduction etc etc ... i think we get very bad value for our tax £££ across national and local government from large programmes to stationary cupboards ... so i am sympathetic to financial disciplines that are more stringent [IT Defence NHS Procurement and the process costs involved in managing expenditures are dreadful examples]

i remain to be convinced that overall economic growth has much to do with the relative size of the public sector but a lot to do with the quality and extent of transport and communications infrastructure, reliable medium and long term finance, the rule of law and regulation of markets, education and knowledge creation, innovation and so forth ... i find the neo con views of the damaging effect of the public sector a highly reductionist ideology with no empirical basis ... but i do feel that they and their gangster constituency really do damage growth by impoverishing the good society, inhibiting creative arts and knowledge creation and destroying ambition and achievement through their vile corruption and careerism ......

but then i am just an angry old geezer innit ...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

British planning certainly needs reform to make it fit for modern purpose. But any link between this and the economy's need for revived demand is a distraction. It is lack of demand, not planning, that has stopped housebuilding dead. It is lack of demand, not planning, that stops new factories on empty sites. It is lack of demand, not planning, that has high streets closing, firms laying off staff and banks not lending. Cameron, George Osborne and Vince Cable can tinker with the supply side all they like. Without demand no economy can recover.

do not often agree with Mr Jenkins

[Serial_Apologist]

do not often agree with Mr Jenkins

As regards planning, a spokesperson from the CPRE yesterday alleged that most costly delays through local enquiries are tied up, not by bureaucratic obstructions per se, or local objections, but commercial competitors wrangling among themselves over rights to particular sites.

[Lateralthinking1]

Cameron On Judicial Reviews

Working For a Clampdown or Anarchy in the UK?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/19/david-cameron-clampdown-judicial-review

On the surface, Cameron in this speech went all punk rock on us. He's had enough of the system and he wants to "smash it up". Scratch that surface. One sees that the Chancellor is an itch. Yes. Gideon's anti windmills brigade is on the march to No.10. In case you hadn't noticed, it is Margaret and Major all over again. Each found that the enemy was within. Now it's Dave's lucky day. He's in a mad rush because he wants the mills as well as more concrete. Gidfolk want the concrete but only after deflating the sails. For concrete, read airports and nuclear power. Both sides want those. But while No.11 appears to side with the public on preventing ecologically driven development, the PM is apparently no longer prepared to tolerate any public opposition at all.

Of course, we know that Nicholas Clegg can travel within seconds from orange to blue. Yellow and green don't even touch the sides of him. But the rant of our Prime Minister displays his own instinctive economic liberalism. Everything goes. To hell with conserving, whether that is as in conservation or conservatism. While in many respects he is the antithesis of socialism's state control, in others he is the same. To win any battle inside his party, there has to be a clampdown. No more obstructions from Joe Public. No law courts pondering whether, say, an airports policy is theoretically rational. Ironically, this in Dave's view is him being Churchill. But in tearing at the law he is now arguably more anarchic than Sid Vicious in his heyday. That's an even greater irony.



A most bizarre torching of the law courts

For JRs have been popular, much to Ministers' chagrin. Anyone with excess cash and contacts has easy access to that mechanism. He or she will be highly aware that Judge Dubious is not to be won over by a honey bee. Nor is he likely to be bothered about the destruction of a norman church or an octogenarian having sleepless nights. No. He will though want to know about the statistics on page 27 of the key document. When it says that Britain will benefit by £x billion pounds before the year 2100 if ten nuclear power stations are built in Ormskirk, is this actually true? If it isn't, he may declare that the policy is irrational or, god forbid, even unreasonable. I say "may" because we must naively assume here that he doesn't stand to benefit from the building of them himself.

So, in law, the number crunchers are then outcasts. Hooray. Your red squirrel is safe and that castle will not be moved. Mothers will not worry at night that their babies may be irradiated when they turn 40. The towns will be as inviting as a Lowry painting. The villages will be untroubled by street light. And all because a Permanent Secretary failed to notice that a seventh runway at London Heathrow would cost just a little more than the estimated ten bob. One can have a modicum of sympathy for the expansionists and their merry band of followers. For the purposes of this piece, we shall call those economists. However, if there are arguments for and against the stalling of policy by a money bagged Fred Bloggs, there is a more crucial question. It doesn't involve bluebells.

It is about individuals' rights to protect themselves from the cowboy tendencies of the state. You know the kind of thing. Borrow a wodge of cash with no intention of paying it back, employ a bunch of workers from the Arctic Circle who are happy to be paid with a food voucher, buy the wood from a friend of a Lord who lives in Asia and go out for a night on the tiles as soon as the signature of M. Mouse is on the dotted line. It is when a policy is taken forward and the design is fundamentally lousy that aircraft career into living rooms and Greater Manchester turns into Fukushima. Then your daft Judicial Review becomes nothing less than essential. Your honour, I accept that the flaming sword on my balcony kept my bills down but was the project administered correctly?



A worried member of the public looks on

No part of the Government welcomes those kinds of rights. The Chancellor has no greater belief in the right of a member of the public to challenge policy than does the Prime Minister. Nevertheless he is pragmatic to a fault. Green has not been detected in his DNA. He does though have political antennae. He knows that normal farms are barely tolerated by shires people. Consequently wind farms are anathema. If people want to pay for lawyers to dilly-dally, he may well feel that they should be encouraged to do so. He could always introduce a strong form of gagging order for matters important to him should he ever become the Prime Minister.

Cameron has his own interests in mind. That's understandable but it's also a dangerous place in which to decide policy. I think that we should be wary of any guy who wants to vandalise the right to a Judicial Review because he has anxieties about wallpaper salesmen. Green types like me may be a bloody nuisance when they show a bit of duffel coated clout. But dealing with them simply by turfing us all out into dying woods might ultimately bite in ways that are unexpected. Rationally, if you are a home owner, you would support the rights to Judicial Review, even if you work at Sellafield, fly twice weekly and detest all wildlife. Unless, of course, you genuinely believe that all projects will be undertaken with commitment to professionalism and are bound to be 100% safe.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

boy george without make up ....

[rauschwerk]

I have given up hoping for any kind of Plan B and am greatly relieved that I rely on no benefits other than the State pension. Even if Osborne knew what Plan B looked like, he would not implement it because his hands are tied, partly by the obsession with the idea that deficit financing is always a bad thing. This excellent book http://treasureislands.org/ (do your best not to be irritated by the catchpenny subtitle) explains a lot about the state we are in. I'm halfway through it right now and it is doing absolutely nothing to cheer me up.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...read that book's excellent reviews rauschwerk .... the detail is not for me when it comes to billions moving in bank accounts though ...

[rauschwerk]

...read that book's excellent reviews rauschwerk .... the detail is not for me when it comes to billions moving in bank accounts though ...

I'm having to work hard and have read at least one chapter twice.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

er Danny Blanchflower does not approve of the PM - economic gibberish he says of his CBI speech

and George fares badly too

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

In their new book, Economists and the Powerful, Norbert Häring and Niall Douglas trace how the most powerful of all the social sciences became a doctrine for helping the rich – with the aid of huge sums from business. You may be familiar with a version of this critique, thanks to the film Inside Job, which described how some of the best-known economists practising today are in the pay of Wall Street. But the history unearthed by Häring and Douglas is far more disturbing – because they argue that vested interests have slanted some of economics' most fundamental ideas.

graun

book

http://economistsandthepowerful.anthempressblog.com/

[Serial_Apologist]

graun

book

http://economistsandthepowerful.anthempressblog.com/

Haring and Douglas appear to have summed matters up rather nicely.

What is so embittering for those who have seen this coming, even albeit in forms less acute than even our most pessimistic assumptions predicted, is that, taking the Alternative Economic Strategy put forward by Tribune and other subgroups within the Labour Party in the 1980s/early 1990s as a bare minimum on which to build extra-parliamentary movements, "alternative economic thinking" was once there for all to see, were it not for pusillanimous BBC commentators of the time and since, and its more easily explained cynical marginalisation at best, misrepresentation at worst, by the popular press.

While Kinnock in his time speechified on the benefits of higher taxes protecting the rich by maintaining (ie perpetuating) the infrastructural conditions necessitating their thrival and survival, he and others on the right of the labour movement deliberately used Militant as exemplary of an entire left he characterised as undemocratic, or in other words a projection of his and their very own reality. Blair's abolition of Clause Four could then pass by as little more than a whisper. "Our Friends in the North" outlined the aetiology in brilliant detail in all its ramifications, individual, cultural, ethical.

Now that the cat is well and truly out of the bag, and remaining residuals of trade unionist militancy from a numerically diminished force, once potentially a vital potential ingredient in change, trade on past arguments, failed campaigns and rhetoric while the wealth gap widens and the environment goes down the plughole, it's now a mug's game to own up to being a conspiracy theorist; but we can still in all clean conscience say:

WE TOLD YOU SO!!!!

[handsomefortune]

groovy economist alert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkesgECRXtM

'hard talk'.....sm is hard work (more like) especially when an interesting response is interrupted.