BBC NEWS | Business | Darling spending plan 'misguided'
The government's plan to spend its way out of the looming recession is "misguided and discredited", say leading economists. Chancellor Alistair Darling wants to bring forward spending on key state-funded projects to kick-start economic recovery. But a group of 16 economists say it risks damaging private sector recovery.
The government's plan to spend its way out of the looming recession is "misguided and discredited", say leading economists.
Chancellor Alistair Darling wants to bring forward spending on key state-funded projects to kick-start economic recovery.
But a group of 16 economists say it risks damaging private sector recovery.
All very serious. And these clowns did such a good job of predicting the recent past that their credibility sails on, resolute and undented. Naturally.
The City and its financial services industry must be much like Wall Street in the US--a giant leech attached to the body politic. Heat from the glowing embers of that sector will cause the leech to let go--eventually. The question is how much public debt will have to be assumed before that happens. Let all of these financial service firms die. There is nothing that can be done to stop it. The only question is how much of our wealth to put on the funeral pyre. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Cost of crash: $2,800,000,000,000
Snippets of this interview were repeated constantly throughout the day.
Howard Dean said the first thing Democrats needed to do was turn up. He was right. Money is a sign of Poverty - Culture Saying
1) There's a strong concentration on technicalities at the expense of the political message being pushed.
- For example a lot of concentration on the technical notions that a cut in low earner tax (e.g. a NI holiday) would feed into the economy quicker than infrastructure:
- No mention of the role of infrastructure contracts in slowing the collapse of construction employment.
- No mention that infrastructure spending provides more stimulus than tax cuts.
- No mention that in a highly indebted environment, low end tax cuts are as vulnerable as other money supply measures to "pushing on a string" problems.
2) Most of all however, no mention, as you note that they wouldn't actually be proposing a tax cut for the low end, let alone a tax cut for the low end only.
3) The allocative efficiency argument is so depressing, as we face a crisis built up out of the misallocation of resources by the market over a long period.
>The right-wing tendencies of the British blogosphere
