- hi; in article,
<
UdadnSj8qrPvTMnN...@brightview.co.uk>
un...@judgemental.plus.com "Nigel Stapley" charged:
>>> steveski wrote:
>>>> Nigel Stapley wrote:
>>>>>This has since been used to frighten millions of Brits into not voting
>>>>>for anything remotely left-wing ever since - nor even the Labour Party.)
>>>>Is the Labour party even *remotely* left wing these days? I mourn.
>>>No - nor has it been since about 1976 when Denis Healey turned chicken and
>>>cut public spending to placate the IMF and its Chicago-school ideologues.
>>ITYM "was forced to cut public spending by the fact that there was no more
>>money anywhere to be had, borrowed or printed, and nobody would carry on
>>lending to a nation that was already mortgaged up to the hilt and unable to
>>pay its existing debts"
- i think this thread would be less liable to turn rancorous,
and more likely to prove of interest to more afpers - if the
arguments were to concentrate on what is, or would constitute,
left-wing approaches to problems and possible programmes of
actions to put these into practice - and how the achievements
of these programmes, & their successes and failures, could be
measured - in the present circumstances, which are somewhat
different from those prevailing in the seventies.
>That view is, of course, the orthodox one we've had rammed down our
>throats for 35 years. The truth of it is that there was no compelling
>reason for Healey to kiss the arse of the IMF.
- crudities aside, this is both true and untrue: earnings by
financial services and similar, including banking, from over-
seas were systematically underestimated in ways not realised
at the time, giving rise to the appearance of a major balance-
of-payments deficit requiring public borrowing at a level the
commercial money markets felt would make spending cuts or a
devaluation - or both - necessary; so that's the way they bet,
and upped the effective interest rate they required to a level
that was unacceptably high. since devaluation was also judged
politically unacceptable by the government, that left only the
international monetary fund - and the political and economic
terms they set.
- but that prevailing belief, although now known to be mistaken,
is nevertheless what defined the actual economic circumstances
in which the government operated in the era of fixed (and only
rarely alterable) major and trading currency exchange rates.
>
>> Basic economics: Further spending is not the way out of debt. It increases
>> it, not decreases it. If you, as a person, were so far in debt that you
>> weren't meeting the existing agreed-on repayments, then why should anybody
>> else lend you any more so you can spend yet more, and then fail to pay back
>> the new loans as well as the old? The same applies to nations as to people.
>
>No it *doesn't*. This is another one of the poisonous legacies of
>Thatcherism, namely that you not only *can* run a country's economy in
>the same way that you would run a corner grocer's in Lincolnshire, but
>that you *should* do so. Apples and oranges.
- the practical measure of how much (and whether) a nation can
afford to borrow is the interest rate its government or national
bank is charged upon its borrowings. this is indicated by such
things as the size of the discount at which new issues of govern-
ment debt sells, the interest rate it has to offer people to
attract their savings, etc. public and institutional confidence
is somewhat less than entirely rational, but it is what deter-
mines the levels of interest nations are charged.
- this rate is currently extremely low, for the uk & for merkia,
inter alia, and has been for some considerable time.
>
>We had all this out with that preening little tit Dunbar a few months
>ago. I'd advise you to check out that thread (entitled "Electric cars
>again") for what happened to him.
- leaving out personal insults, which i for one should far, far
rather prefer, and bearing in mind that the right-wing programme
for recovery from economic depression has not worked in the past,
is currently still fixing fair to provoke violent unrest in two
eu countries - potentially more - as adult unemployment rises to-
wards 50% (or higher), holding out no prospects for any sizeable
recovery of the uk economy within the next six to eight years;
- and bearing in mind also that, whilst it took major deficit
public spending by several countries to pull the world economy
out of the recession, but that roosevelt's "new deal" programme
did not by itself provide sufficiently powerful a locomotive of
deficit spending investment to lift the merkin economy out of
the depression, let alone that of the whole world;
- what specific projects should the british (uk) and scottish
governments start up or expand, what industries should they
be looking to boost to increase employment, and therefore the
current buying power of (and tax income from) our population,
and at the same time increase the ability of our society to
create greater and more fairly widespread wealth in future?
- what series of public investments should the merkin, british,
german, canadadadian, french, polish, russian, chinese, indian,
brasilian, japanese, indonesian, xxxxian & kiwiiiian goverments
between them agree to undertake, to get the world economy back
on its feet again - without embarking on a world-wide arms build-
up leading up to a third world war to do so, in the way it took
the second world war and the preceding arms build-up to get us
out of the great depression?
- love, a ppint. not expecting a complete blueprint - but anyone
with a few ideas better than our current shower of (uk) crooks?
[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--
"only two groups of people in society actually behave
in a completely logical, self-interested way: one of
these is economists themselves; the other is psychopaths."
- "the trap" - bbc2 18/3/07 [3/18/07 for merkins] 21:55 GMT