More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
I liked Cameron but Brexit rules him out. (He opposed it and failed.) He wasn't in power that long either and didn't really have any major achievements. Decent man, disappointing result.
Agree re Boris. I may yet be pleasantly surprised but I remember voting for him as Mayor London, and in the end was unpleasantly surprised.
Blair was on your list but he reneged on his pledge to hold a referendum on Lisbon (though it was Brown in the end that signed it too). Do you think honourably holding and losing a referendum on a very divisive issue is worse than pledging to hold one, then reversing that after the election because you knew you'd lose it and implementing what you'd pledged not to without a referendum anyway?
Cameron and Osborne saved the economy from a catastrophic deficit. For that alone they deserve to be listed amongst the greats for me. Introducing equal marriage was the cherry on the cake.
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
Didn't Cameron and Osborne pledge to match Labour spending pre crash?
An outrageous quoting of the facts to try and divert away from the spin. Shame...
Oh go on then. We could afford to run a small deficit for investment because overall debt had dropped. According to Cameron's Office for Budget Responsibility debt had risen to an outrageous 33.4% in 2007 vs a far more acceptable and clearly lower 36.1% in 1996 (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp).
You can spend more in deficit when your overall borrowing is lower because the economy is growing. As Cameron the LOTO pledged to do, match every pound Brown was spending AND share in the proceeds of (further, faster) economic growth with a tax cut on top.
Top class revisionist history Philip. Bravo.
No we couldn't afford to run a deficit during a boom.
When the economy is growing is precisely when you DON'T borrow excessively. Excessive borrowing should be done countercyclically. You borrow during the bad times, not the good ones.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
Bill Clinton too and Cameron and Macmillan
I agree that Clinton merits a high rating. Tarnished by the Lewinsky affair though - there's no getting around that. Tacky and exploitative behaviour.
Can't have Clinton, but not for tackiness. The Financial Crisis had many sources but none greater than his extension of sub-prime loans to people who couldn't manage them.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
The government can't finance a large deficit by QE on an ongoing basis without creating the high interest rate environments of the past.
As for austerity being "counter productive" if it was then why did the UK under the Tories for the 2010s decade grow faster that the rest of the EU across the decade?
We had lower unemployment than the rest of the EU across the decade, faster growth than the rest of the EU across the decade and the deficit come down - and you think that was "counter productive"?
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
Didn't Cameron and Osborne pledge to match Labour spending pre crash?
An outrageous quoting of the facts to try and divert away from the spin. Shame...
Oh go on then. We could afford to run a small deficit for investment because overall debt had dropped. According to Cameron's Office for Budget Responsibility debt had risen to an outrageous 33.4% in 2007 vs a far more acceptable and clearly lower 36.1% in 1996 (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp).
You can spend more in deficit when your overall borrowing is lower because the economy is growing. As Cameron the LOTO pledged to do, match every pound Brown was spending AND share in the proceeds of (further, faster) economic growth with a tax cut on top.
Top class revisionist history Philip. Bravo.
And Labour supported our entry into the ERM. Didn’t stop the Tories (rightly) getting the blame for that fiasco.
My recollection of the time leading up to 2008 was that The economy was growing fairly well; Government spending was going up even faster (hence the “sharing the proceeds of growth” line from the Tories); Any attempt by the Tories to suggest that spending shouldn’t go up quite as fast was met with a (very effective) barrage about how many nurses they wanted to put out of work from Labour. Were they cowardly to give in and agree to Labour spending plans? Yes. Were those spending plans unwise? Also yes.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
I assume that Halfords are donors to the Conservative and Formerly Unionist Party? They certainly sound like a typical outfit.
Spain had a very strict lockdown, plus everyone wearing facemasks, even outside. Why are they experiencing a rise in cases?
Note your own use of the past tense “had”. Then factor in imported cases due to tourism.
The elephant in the room is airports. Not just in Spain, but worldwide. Governments need to come down on them like a ton of bricks, eg. with total prohibition of shops and restaurants within airports; and “quarantine” meaning quarantine.
Travel per se is dangerous and holidays abroad this year are a daft idea. However, the vast majority of outbreaks here in Spain relate to agricultural workers and internal tourism - family gatherings, parties, dscos, etc. The hard lockdown needed to be eased more gradually and night time venues should have been much more strictly controlled. I believe they are still closed in the UK which makes sense.
Internal tourism, as you imply, is far from risk-free. I fail to see the problem with simply accepting that this year everyone ought to holiday within their own small corner of the world. Most people have tons of things to do and see within an hour or two of their home. Self-education, self-improvement and thrift used to be considered part of the very foundations of European society. Hard to see why they went out of fashion.
I return to work on Monday after over five weeks holiday (I have rights to ridiculously long periods of leave) and have only travelled within a tight corner of the country. We have had a great time, and have seen and done lots of things we would have missed if we’d taken a fortnight in Sicily (our recent favourite).
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
Blair would have got us into the euro (and I think still, bizarrely, supports membership, or would if we hadn't left the EU). Iraq. Lisbon referendum. Botched devolution and constitutional reforms. Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash. Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
Didn't Cameron and Osborne pledge to match Labour spending pre crash?
An outrageous quoting of the facts to try and divert away from the spin. Shame...
Oh go on then. We could afford to run a small deficit for investment because overall debt had dropped. According to Cameron's Office for Budget Responsibility debt had risen to an outrageous 33.4% in 2007 vs a far more acceptable and clearly lower 36.1% in 1996 (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp).
You can spend more in deficit when your overall borrowing is lower because the economy is growing. As Cameron the LOTO pledged to do, match every pound Brown was spending AND share in the proceeds of (further, faster) economic growth with a tax cut on top.
Top class revisionist history Philip. Bravo.
No we couldn't afford to run a deficit during a boom.
When the economy is growing is precisely when you DON'T borrow excessively. Excessive borrowing should be done countercyclically. You borrow during the bad times, not the good ones.
Keynesian economics.
It wasn't excessive. If it was excessive we would have been drowning in debt. We were not. Which is why Cameron and Osborne planned to spend even more than Brown did.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
Didn't Cameron and Osborne pledge to match Labour spending pre crash?
An outrageous quoting of the facts to try and divert away from the spin. Shame...
Oh go on then. We could afford to run a small deficit for investment because overall debt had dropped. According to Cameron's Office for Budget Responsibility debt had risen to an outrageous 33.4% in 2007 vs a far more acceptable and clearly lower 36.1% in 1996 (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt-to-gdp).
You can spend more in deficit when your overall borrowing is lower because the economy is growing. As Cameron the LOTO pledged to do, match every pound Brown was spending AND share in the proceeds of (further, faster) economic growth with a tax cut on top.
Top class revisionist history Philip. Bravo.
No we couldn't afford to run a deficit during a boom.
When the economy is growing is precisely when you DON'T borrow excessively. Excessive borrowing should be done countercyclically. You borrow during the bad times, not the good ones.
Keynesian economics.
It wasn't excessive. If it was excessive we would have been drowning in debt. We were not. Which is why Cameron and Osborne planned to spend even more than Brown did.
No, we wouldn't be drowning in debt until the [inevitable] next bust came. It was extremely excessive for that stage of the economic cycle and when the bust inevitably came we did start drowning in debt.
The only way Brown's pre-crash deficit could be afforded is if we would never again have a crash. If you are arrogant enough to think that boom and bust has been abolished.
It can't be. It wasn't. That you still fall for Brown's arrogance after all that happened is beyond shocking. Do you seriously think Brown had abolished boom and bust?
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
Bill Clinton too and Cameron and Macmillan
Reserving judgement on Johnson for the moment?
I would include Reagan for collapsing the Soviet Union, if more by accident than design.
Yes, Reagan should certainly be added too, Ford also did an OK job for a short time
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
Blair would have got us into the euro (and I think still, bizarrely, supports membership, or would if we hadn't left the EU). Iraq. Lisbon referendum. Botched devolution and constitutional reforms. Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash. Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
Overall a poor to terrible PM.
Agree about 1 and 3. Not sure about 4, and sacking Brown wasn't, I suspect, a practicality, given Brown's popularity in the party, especially in Scotland. You might reasonably add hanging on too long and NOT handing over to Brown earlier. By the time Brown did take over he had become bitter and twisted.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
It wasn't excessive. If it was excessive we would have been drowning in debt. We were not. Which is why Cameron and Osborne planned to spend even more than Brown did.
No, we wouldn't be drowning in debt until the [inevitable] next bust came. It was extremely excessive for that stage of the economic cycle and when the bust inevitably came we did start drowning in debt.
The only way Brown's pre-crash deficit could be afforded is if we would never again have a crash. If you are arrogant enough to think that boom and bust has been abolished.
It can't be. It wasn't. That you still fall for Brown's arrogance after all that happened is beyond shocking. Do you seriously think Brown had abolished boom and bust?
No of course he hadn't and yes he was arrogant and any other term you want to post. So what? You are rewriting historical fact. Borrowing to invest when the economy could afford the debt made sense. Why? Because the man you posted as a great PM pledged to maintain it. So either he was stupid or lying, or you're rewriting history post facto. OK so Tories do that a lot with the economy - they spent years berating Brown for inflating a bubble - yet their alternative plan at the time was to inflate said bubble even bigger so that it could allow both the spending and a tax cut.
Why didn't they make you Chancellor as you clearly know more than Osborne did?
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
It wasn't excessive. If it was excessive we would have been drowning in debt. We were not. Which is why Cameron and Osborne planned to spend even more than Brown did.
No, we wouldn't be drowning in debt until the [inevitable] next bust came. It was extremely excessive for that stage of the economic cycle and when the bust inevitably came we did start drowning in debt.
The only way Brown's pre-crash deficit could be afforded is if we would never again have a crash. If you are arrogant enough to think that boom and bust has been abolished.
It can't be. It wasn't. That you still fall for Brown's arrogance after all that happened is beyond shocking. Do you seriously think Brown had abolished boom and bust?
No of course he hadn't and yes he was arrogant and any other term you want to post. So what? You are rewriting historical fact. Borrowing to invest when the economy could afford the debt made sense. Why? Because the man you posted as a great PM pledged to maintain it. So either he was stupid or lying, or you're rewriting history post facto. OK so Tories do that a lot with the economy - they spent years berating Brown for inflating a bubble - yet their alternative plan at the time was to inflate said bubble even bigger so that it could allow both the spending and a tax cut.
Why didn't they make you Chancellor as you clearly know more than Osborne did?
Borrowing to invest when the country was booming pre-recession did not make sense. Borrowing makes sense countercyclically.
The man I posted as a great PM was great for cleaning up Brown's mess. He didn't pledge to maintain a deficit, pre-crash he was talking about bringing it down quite sensibly. The 2 year spending match pledge was political and did not make economic sense but made political sense.
The Tories attacked Brown's deficit in 2005 election too but the voters didn't care and gave Labour another majority. The Tories were right, the voters just didn't realise it until the crash came.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The classic case of the difference between urgent and important.
The irony is that someone dying of poverty in the UK is normally not because of a lack of money, but the incompetence of the state in getting that money to the recipient in a timely fashion.
'Do not hold grudges' is an odd one isn't it? Did he mean 'Does not hold grudges?' - as in that's a plus for Kamala? If she doesn't hold grudges, I'd agree that's a definite plus for her.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
Blair would have got us into the euro (and I think still, bizarrely, supports membership, or would if we hadn't left the EU). Iraq. Lisbon referendum. Botched devolution and constitutional reforms. Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash. Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
Overall a poor to terrible PM.
Agree about 1 and 3. Not sure about 4, and sacking Brown wasn't, I suspect, a practicality, given Brown's popularity in the party, especially in Scotland. You might reasonably add hanging on too long and NOT handing over to Brown earlier. By the time Brown did take over he had become bitter and twisted.
Just realised the numbering is one out. Iraq was a terrible blunder..... the current BBC programme probably overstates the situation, but only a little, and giving Prescott his head over electoral reform was a bad mistake.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
Of course its somewhere in-between. Only a fool would argue that no mistakes were made. My point is that the political "its Brown's fault" name calling is revisionist. Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
Blair would have got us into the euro (and I think still, bizarrely, supports membership, or would if we hadn't left the EU). Iraq. Lisbon referendum. Botched devolution and constitutional reforms. Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash. Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
Overall a poor to terrible PM.
Agree about 1 and 3. Not sure about 4, and sacking Brown wasn't, I suspect, a practicality, given Brown's popularity in the party, especially in Scotland. You might reasonably add hanging on too long and NOT handing over to Brown earlier. By the time Brown did take over he had become bitter and twisted.
Failure in succession planning was another fail. It was essential to Labour that there was someone, preferably more than one, capable of the number 1 position (i.e. not Brown) to succeed Blair. Napoleon types are often sub optimal at this. I have a feeling Boris may be no better at it.
'Do not hold grudges' is an odd one isn't it? Did he mean 'Does not hold grudges?' - as in that's a plus for Kamala? If she doesn't hold grudges, I'd agree that's a definite plus for her.
It looks like a list of buzzwords for soundbites to me that have been tested to fit the campaign. A reminder to use particular phrases when interviewed.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
There is no doubt, even amongst noted Labour economists, that Brown spent too much in a period of unprecedented receipts and a booming economy. In addition, he implemented several measures which exacerbated the situation (eg excluding housing costs from inflation which, lo, meant that inflation appeared lower than it could/should have been). Remember the (self-certifying) mortgage offers that fell out of your cornflakes boxes?
Indeed it was to a large extent the UK's bonkers housing market that meant it wasn't only investment banks selling CDSs that went pop in the GFC but domestic lenders also.
And this is of course not to mention Peter Lilley's proverbial warning about financial services regulation which proved so prescient.
Well, Blair gets in on general competence and winning three elections so not a close call for me, but I take your points.
Blair would have got us into the euro (and I think still, bizarrely, supports membership, or would if we hadn't left the EU). Iraq. Lisbon referendum. Botched devolution and constitutional reforms. Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash. Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
Overall a poor to terrible PM.
Agree about 1 and 3. Not sure about 4, and sacking Brown wasn't, I suspect, a practicality, given Brown's popularity in the party, especially in Scotland. You might reasonably add hanging on too long and NOT handing over to Brown earlier. By the time Brown did take over he had become bitter and twisted.
Failure in succession planning was another fail. It was essential to Labour that there was someone, preferably more than one, capable of the number 1 position (i.e. not Brown) to succeed Blair. Napoleon types are often sub optimal at this. I have a feeling Boris may be no better at it.
Given the muppets he’s surrounded himself with succession planning is the last thing on his mind there is no one with proven talent in the current cabinet.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The classic case of the difference between urgent and important.
The irony is that someone dying of poverty in the UK is normally not because of a lack of money, but the incompetence of the state in getting that money to the recipient in a timely fashion.
All true again. But we are talking politics. And again, put yourself on QT and begin an explanation of the difference between urgent and important.
A sad tale, but does illustrate how difficult it is to define what is a Covid-19 related death. We are seeing all sorts of odd vascular events.
It also highlights why it's sane to wear a mask and do what you can to avoid catching it.
The initial illness ranges from nothing at all to months of serious illness through to death and the secondary effects are unknown but it's becoming clear that while lungs are damaged by covid the heart may be as well.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
Mr. Pioneers, just on regulation: quality rather than more or less is what matters.
The tax code has far longer than it was pre-Brown, and it could be tripled in size. That would not, however, automatically triple its splendiferousness.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
Of course its somewhere in-between. Only a fool would argue that no mistakes were made. My point is that the political "its Brown's fault" name calling is revisionist. Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
Yes, this actually has me extremely worried about the future of the economy. Self financing debt is a necessity at the moment but both the treasury and Bank need to show a way out of it and we also need some pretty tough rules on using it in the future, what does and doesn't constitute an emergency situation.
To add to your example, the government declared a climate emergency last year, does that entitle them to invest magic money in the green economy to reduce the national dependence on fossil fuels? I don't think it does, but I think if you polled MPs most Labour and quite a few Tory ones would say it does. I'd actually like to see a cross party consensus on this that both major parties sign up to so that it would be very difficult for either to undo.
A sad tale, but does illustrate how difficult it is to define what is a Covid-19 related death. We are seeing all sorts of odd vascular events.
It also highlights why it's sane to wear a mask and do what you can to avoid catching it.
The initial illness ranges from nothing at all to months of serious illness through to death and the secondary effects are unknown but it's becoming clear that while lungs are damaged by covid the heart may be as well.
The clotting seems to be the thing. It can cause strokes, heart attacks or damage to other organs, specifically lungs depending on how unlucky you are. I wonder if the better survival rate is connected with this side effect being more focused on? Maybe @Foxy could comment.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Iraq has been a spectacular fail. The saving grace is the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he would have probably been dead before long anyway and his sons wouldn't have been tolerated. Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
That's politics not economics.
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
Of course its somewhere in-between. Only a fool would argue that no mistakes were made. My point is that the political "its Brown's fault" name calling is revisionist. Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
@RochdalePioneers - you are absolutely correct, but there is a sizeable component of PB that consist of fan-boys mindlessly repeating "their sides" position over and over. I wonder if they actually believe what they are saying or whether they think that if they keep spouting it often enough then the rest of us will see the light and have Dasmascene conversions...
The idea we'd have been better off in the GFC when the Tories wanted less regulation is laughable
We'd have been better off if Brown wasn't so arrogant as to believe he'd abolished busts and so was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the bust.
Indeed. If we’d joined the Euro, his hubris wouldn’t have got out of control and he’d have needed to stick to his promise on preventing another housing bubble.
Mr. Pioneers, just on regulation: quality rather than more or less is what matters.
The tax code has far longer than it was pre-Brown, and it could be tripled in size. That would not, however, automatically triple its splendiferousness.
Which goes back to a problem in government - a world wide problem.
The increasing complexity of tax codes and laws in general is driven by the desire to remove judgment from the system. A perfect rule book that will always have the answer.
Humans are non-linear systems - unpredictable. The social structures they build are thus non-linear as well. This means that any attempt to build such a perfect rule book is unlimitedly bound to fail. Ever more rules will simply leave ever more rules to be written.
Particularly since the human reaction to the rule set is to change behaviour. In unpredictable ways.
It could be said that we see an attempt to create an AI engine (the law/tax code) - in which the training consists of a act-observe-legislate loop.
This perspective on the problem suggests a reason why the rules look increasingly like gibberish, can't be explained etc.
It also suggests that since the rate of change is far slower than human social change, that the attempt is somewhere between futile and self harming.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The classic case of the difference between urgent and important.
The irony is that someone dying of poverty in the UK is normally not because of a lack of money, but the incompetence of the state in getting that money to the recipient in a timely fashion.
All true again. But we are talking politics. And again, put yourself on QT and begin an explanation of the difference between urgent and important.
To be honest I think the public has the opposite bias to what you're describing. Pretty much any substantial change for the better is filed under "Oh, we couldn't possibly hope to fix that." Anything bad that's gone on for long enough is taken as an immutable constant of society.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
Of course its somewhere in-between. Only a fool would argue that no mistakes were made. My point is that the political "its Brown's fault" name calling is revisionist. Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
@RochdalePioneers - you are absolutely correct, but there is a sizeable component of PB that consist of fan-boys mindlessly repeating "their sides" position over and over. I wonder if they actually believe what they are saying or whether they think that if they keep spouting it often enough then the rest of us will see the light and have Dasmascene conversions...
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
That's politics not economics.
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
Of course it's politics. That is the blog we are on. Politics.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
That's politics not economics.
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
This is the issue we're talking about though, bringing QE into the political sphere as the government has done by self-financing debt in an emergency (a political goal) rather than the Bank doing it to boost money supply and inflation (an economic goal) is a problem that no one in power is currently addressing.
As I said, I'm not against the use of QE in this instance, however, there does need to be some rules on when and how self-financing can be used by any government in the future. It should be added the Bank's charter and have cross-party support. I don't think we should get to a situation where politicians are deciding what does and doesn't constitute an emergency worthy of self-financing depending on who is in power and what their political goals are.
This is all well and good, but what are everyones' thoughts on datarooms ?
I think this site needs to stop wasting time on them and get on to more relevant topics like penis enlargement and the long-awaited IMF Compensation Scheme for victims of West African online fraud.
The idea we'd have been better off in the GFC when the Tories wanted less regulation is laughable
We'd have been better off if Brown wasn't so arrogant as to believe he'd abolished busts and so was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the bust.
Indeed. If we’d joined the Euro, his hubris wouldn’t have got out of control and he’d have needed to stick to his promise on preventing another housing bubble.
Or more likely we'd have ignored all of those rules, gone on a huge state and personal debt binge and then had no way of printing/inflating our way out of debt as we did from 2008-2013. The Eurozone crisis would have been about 10x worse with us in it and needing bailing out.
As an aside, an interesting snippet of news I caught a few days ago was about an Ethiopian dam built across the Nile. Sudan and Egypt are apparently very annoyed by the risks posed by it and it all sounds rather testy.
A sad tale, but does illustrate how difficult it is to define what is a Covid-19 related death. We are seeing all sorts of odd vascular events.
It also highlights why it's sane to wear a mask and do what you can to avoid catching it.
The initial illness ranges from nothing at all to months of serious illness through to death and the secondary effects are unknown but it's becoming clear that while lungs are damaged by covid the heart may be as well.
The clotting seems to be the thing. It can cause strokes, heart attacks or damage to other organs, specifically lungs depending on how unlucky you are. I wonder if the better survival rate is connected with this side effect being more focused on? Maybe @Foxy could comment.
Yes, management of clotting is quite critical in the vasculopathy. Vascular sudden death in the elderly seems to be a feature. Generally quick and clean at least.
This piece from a Covid-19 rehab centre in Wales is an eyeopener too.
On Brown I don't think that there is much more to say. What needs to be appreciated is that his higher than average growth was achieved by an above increase in public spending driving consumption, increasing the trade deficit and ensuring that even with the mega profits generated by financial services at the peak of the bubble all the money (and then some) was being spent.
At the time of the crash that had not stopped. The reforms that he had introduced such as WFTC, EMA for school kids, PFI commitments, etc meant that public spending was on a strongly upward path at the time of the GFC. One of the reasons that people think that there was so much austerity (when in fact government spending continually rose in real terms) is the unwinding of those commitments.
Even if the GFC had not happened we were on a completely unsustainable path. This foolishness was then combined with delusion and dishonesty when Brown refused to allow Darling to publish a spending review that would have made it obvious that most of his cherished programs needed cut back severely so that the Tories would take the blame for "cuts". Crude politics but very much not in the national interest at a time when our finances were being looked at carefully by the markets we were so dependent upon. If we had not been fortunate enough to get the stability of the Coalition we might have had a very difficult time indeed.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
I have noticed rampant inflation in bicycle components lately. This fifty quid voucher is probably going to increase prices even further.
The inner tubes I bought went up 100% in price over six weeks from end-March to May.
There's been a huge increase in bike thefts lately. We had ours stolen a few weeks back. They were all locked up but the thieves ripped the stand out of the wall. We think we saw them for sale on Ebay the other day and have notified the police, though doubt anything will come of it.
Gordon Brown -- even if @Philip_Thompson were right about his performance as Chancellor, what has this to do with evaluating him as a Prime Minister? No other PM on this thread is judged on their performance in other posts.
Can anyone remember when we last had this discussion? I linked to a set of slides from a Cambridge economist who neatly summarised the issue, showing out to be some where between @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers positions. I now can’t remember what google search I did to find it...
Of course its somewhere in-between. Only a fool would argue that no mistakes were made. My point is that the political "its Brown's fault" name calling is revisionist. Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
But the point is that Labour were in power at the time.
Let me give you the opposite example. There was a politician who, on Black Wednesday, screamed and shouted and stamped his feet about how vital it was Britain stayed in the ERM. He’d been arguing for the importance of it for years. One little blip shouldn’t have made a difference.
As we all know, we made a mistake going in, and an even bigger mistake staying in as long as we did.
Who was the politician? Gordon Brown.
Who got the blame? The Tories, because they had also espoused this policy and were in power at the time.
Who deserved the blame? The Tories, undoubtedly. They were in power. They had failed dismally on every point. Did it matter that the Opposition were just as dumb? No. Because the Government are meant to know what they’re doing.
What was the result? Gordon Brown rode the wave of discontent at their following a policy he supported to ten years at the Treasury and three more as PM.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
That's politics not economics.
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
This is the issue we're talking about though, bringing QE into the political sphere as the government has done by self-financing debt in an emergency (a political goal) rather than the Bank doing it to boost money supply and inflation (an economic goal) is a problem that no one in power is currently addressing.
As I said, I'm not against the use of QE in this instance, however, there does need to be some rules on when and how self-financing can be used by any government in the future. It should be added the Bank's charter and have cross-party support. I don't think we should get to a situation where politicians are deciding what does and doesn't constitute an emergency worthy of self-finasncing depending on who is in power and what their political goals are.
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
Bill Clinton too and Cameron and Macmillan
I agree that Clinton merits a high rating. Tarnished by the Lewinsky affair though - there's no getting around that. Tacky and exploitative behaviour.
Can't have Clinton, but not for tackiness. The Financial Crisis had many sources but none greater than his extension of sub-prime loans to people who couldn't manage them.
That was banks that did that not Clinton. Clinton ended discrimination, he didn't force banks to give out loans.
"Black people were at fault for the GFC" is a racist myth
To add to your example, the government declared a climate emergency last year, does that entitle them to invest magic money in the green economy to reduce the national dependence on fossil fuels?
Climate change seems to have taken a back seat this year to a pandemic (And rightly so) and racism. I expect many of the XR and BLM protestors are the same people. And the Brexit protests have all packed up and headed home.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Iraq has been a spectacular fail. The saving grace is the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he would have probably been dead before long anyway and his sons wouldn't have been tolerated. Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
Ironically, the removal of all Baathists was a direct response to the criticism of how, at the end of WWII, the new administrations in Japan, Italy and Germany etc were full of members of the previous order.
Those decisions are much less criticised in recent academic works.....
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
The daft one was Road resurfacing.
Badly needed? Yes.
Correct use of public funds? Yes.
An investment that would generate a financial return? You’re having a giraffe.
Who deserved the blame? The Tories, undoubtedly. They were in power. They had failed dismally on every point. Did it matter that the Opposition were just as dumb? No. Because the Government are meant to know what they’re doing.
An odd way to think about it. I judge each individual politician on their own track record, regardless of which seats their party was sitting in at the time.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
A £200 bike-shaped-object from Halfords is perfectly usable for popping to the shops.
A £8000 carbon race machine fully kitted out with Dura-Ace Di2 is not.
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
The daft one was Road resurfacing.
Badly needed? Yes.
Correct use of public funds? Yes.
An investment that would generate a financial return? You’re having a giraffe.
In terms of reduced costs for the people using the roads - reduced fuel usage, reduced damage to vehicles.... I would be interested to see a study on that.
To add to your example, the government declared a climate emergency last year, does that entitle them to invest magic money in the green economy to reduce the national dependence on fossil fuels?
Climate change seems to have taken a back seat this year to a pandemic (And rightly so) and racism. I expect many of the XR and BLM protestors are the same people. And the Brexit protests have all packed up and headed home.
Perhaps the classic geography essay title of "The energy crisis will solve the climate crisis. Discuss." should be replaced with "The COVID-19 crisis will solve the climate crisis. Discuss."
More likely to be cockup than conspiracy. Remember that Met officer who was photographed with all the government’s key counter-terrorism plans in a see through wallet facing outwards.
It doesn’t suggest though that Biden has overcome his habit of making silly mistakes.
Just seen the photoo and it looks contrived. It's not a natural way to hold a piece of paper and why is he scribbling highly legible notes like that and walking around with them?
It’s entirely possible that it’s because of his usual carelessness and muddle-headedness.
Which is why he would be completely the wrong person to be President if the alternative were anyone other than Donald Trump.
That is very unfair, he is also more suited than the other Presidential runner, Mr West.
True.
Out of roughly 170 million eligible people, HTAF did they end up with this lot?
The voting system mostly eliminates people for their negatives, rather than selecting for their positives. Trump is the ones that tests the rule, since negatives were the positives in the eyes of his base, but he only got the job because he was up against Clinton, and she only got the candidature because she was up against Bernie, and so on down the line.
Yes, it's a bad system that promotes all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, but we're hardly in a position to sneer.
Every majority election winner in our system in recent decades has been positively rated themselves regularly and not just riding in on their opponents negatives.
So who do you think were the half-decent Presidents/PMs post WW2?
USA - Truman, Eisenhower (I think), Kennedy, GHW Bush, Obama
Perhaps it's telling that I found it easier to pick the US ones. Seemed to be a clearer difference between the good and the bad. Eisenhower was the only marginal call for me.
The UK seemed to present greater mediocrity. I hesitated over Heath/Wilson for example.
Fun game. Sure there will be plenty of disagreement.
I'd add Cameron to your list for the UK so that's all majority election winners of my lifetime (born under Thatcher).
Too early to judge on Boris.
What did Cameron achieve with his majority win? A disasterous referendum campaign and early retirement is hardly even quarter-decent
For me his two greatest achievements:
* He saved the country from an economic catastrophe that Brown had bequeathed.
* Introduced equal marriage.
Losing an election doesn't count him out for me. Europe was a ticking timebomb in this country for decades and I hold Blair and Brown in more contempt for pushing through Lisbon without a referendum (having pledged one) because they knew they'd lose it, rather than Cameron for fighting honourably and losing. Had Blair/Brown not played silly buggers over Lisbon then I don't think Cameron's referendum would have ever happened or needed to happen.
You said Cameron for his majority win. Gay marriage was a LibDem initiative during the coalition. And by Brown's economic catastrophe I take it you mean the financial crash? Where Cameron and Osborne argued for less regulation of the banking sector because Brown was trying the city up in red tape...
No I don't mean the financial crash. Crashes happen. Recessions happen.
The disaster was not having a crash. The disaster was the decisions made before the crash. The disaster was the Chancellor hubristically believing he'd "abolished boom and bust" and so leaving the country completely unprepared for the inevitable next bust.
During the recession the deficit changed by 7% from trough to peak which is fairly standard for recessions - the financial crash was actually not that exceptional a recession.
What was exceptional, what was catastrophic, was running a 3% deficit BEFORE the recession hit. Had the country been running a small surplus before the recession hit then the deficit would have risen to 7% instead of 10% which is an order of magnitude more manageable.
How was it catastrophic? Gilt yields have been low - indeed often negative in real terms - throughout the 2010s.
Gilt yields were only low because the printing presses were turned on and because the government had a decade of austerity to bring the deficit back under control.
No on austerity - it was counter-productive because of the paradox of thrift and the householder fallacy. Basic first-year macro.
As the government can finance a large deficit by QE, how is having one catastrophic?
If we were in the high interest rate environment of the 80s, I would agree with you. But deficits cannot be catastrophic if they can be financed at very low interest rates. Indeed, arguably it is the government's duty to run one, if the social discount rate exceeds the interest rate.
Financing a temporary deficit by QE in an emergency is one thing. Doing it on a permanent basis leads to pretty bad inflation.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
This is the discussion that @Philip_Thompson and I have had several times. You (and he) are right of course and your analogy is a good one. These are extraordinary times.
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
The distinction is whether something is temporary or permanent.
So ongoing deaths from poverty is OK? It is of course temporary. Given the right resources.
Absolutely poverty or relative poverty?
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
My point is that when head-to-head on QT Labour will say "poverty" and promise to throw resources at it and it would be a "brave" Cons rep that responded by saying that poverty will always exist.
That's politics not economics.
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
This is the issue we're talking about though, bringing QE into the political sphere as the government has done by self-financing debt in an emergency (a political goal) rather than the Bank doing it to boost money supply and inflation (an economic goal) is a problem that no one in power is currently addressing.
As I said, I'm not against the use of QE in this instance, however, there does need to be some rules on when and how self-financing can be used by any government in the future. It should be added the Bank's charter and have cross-party support. I don't think we should get to a situation where politicians are deciding what does and doesn't constitute an emergency worthy of self-finasncing depending on who is in power and what their political goals are.
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
Who deserved the blame? The Tories, undoubtedly. They were in power. They had failed dismally on every point. Did it matter that the Opposition were just as dumb? No. Because the Government are meant to know what they’re doing.
An odd way to think about it. I judge each individual politician on their own track record, regardless of which seats their party was sitting in at the time.
An odd way of looking at it. Politicians get the blame for mistakes that happen on their watch, particularly for glaring and obvious errors (like say, the ERM or running a high deficit at the height of an unstable boom) that anyone with the intellect of a child should have avoided.
And of course, governments are supposed to have all the facts on which to base their policies. Oppositions do not.
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
The daft one was Road resurfacing.
Badly needed? Yes.
Correct use of public funds? Yes.
An investment that would generate a financial return? You’re having a giraffe.
In terms of reduced costs for the people using the roads - reduced fuel usage, reduced damage to vehicles.... I would be interested to see a study on that.
But that doesn’t generate income for the government. Quite the contrary.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
Who deserved the blame? The Tories, undoubtedly. They were in power. They had failed dismally on every point. Did it matter that the Opposition were just as dumb? No. Because the Government are meant to know what they’re doing.
An odd way to think about it. I judge each individual politician on their own track record, regardless of which seats their party was sitting in at the time.
An odd way of looking at it. Politicians get the blame for mistakes that happen on their watch, particularly for glaring and obvious errors (like say, the ERM or running a high deficit at the height of an unstable boom) that anyone with the intellect of a child should have avoided.
And of course, governments are supposed to have all the facts on which to base their policies. Oppositions do not.
In some situations, a decision might hang on information that somebody just doesn't have access to. Fair enough, in that case take it into account when judging them. But for something "glaring and obvious"? Why does it matter whether that person was in government, in opposition, a columnist, a blogger, or something else entirely? Their track record is their track record.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
What's wrong with having a press secretary? The PM surely has better things to do that spend all their time in front of the cameras.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
The spokesperson will be communicating Dom's message, not BoZo's...
Given how bad government comms have been over the last few weeks and how important that a clear message is going out in the middle of a pandemic, my question is why are they being so stingy? MPs are either significantly underpayed for the job they do or they should regard it as a part time post and get a day job that pays the bills. Given that ministers can do their job while being MPs I’m inclined to the latter solution.
The press release from NIESR is a good example of why we need self-financing rules. They say that the furlough should be open ended because it will save 1.2m jobs. The cost of that would be massive and the economic gain small, yet here we are with a respected body essentially asking for unlimited use of self-financing to save an actually pretty small number of jobs when one considers that at the peak of the jobs boom the UK was creating 800-900k jobs in a year.
Again, moving the use of QE into the political sphere is fraught with danger, the government needs to address it or the demands on spending will become unimaginable and eventually we will end up with a huge inflationary crisis and weakening of the currency as asset holders bail out.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Iraq has been a spectacular fail. The saving grace is the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he would have probably been dead before long anyway and his sons wouldn't have been tolerated. Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
Ironically, the removal of all Baathists was a direct response to the criticism of how, at the end of WWII, the new administrations in Japan, Italy and Germany etc were full of members of the previous order.
Those decisions are much less criticised in recent academic works.....
More likely it was because the US administration had forgotten the lessons it learnt at the end of WW2. They started out by trying to deNazify Germany and then realised that it would be impossible to run the country or put it back on its feet if everyone was got rid of. So they focused on the more senior and egregious members of the previous administration and realised that after a catastrophic war you need some level of normality and basic competence and order, something which Iraq did not get it.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
A £200 bike-shaped-object from Halfords is perfectly usable for popping to the shops.
A £8000 carbon race machine fully kitted out with Dura-Ace Di2 is not.
LOL. Have you seen the idiots on their fixies trying to pop-to-the-shops?
A chap I know who owns a bike shop is doing a roaring trade, charging a fortune to add internal hub gears to bikes owned by very unfit, middle aged blokes trying to be Down Wiv Der Kidz.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
It's part of the plan to replace off the record lobby briefing sessions with publicly available press conferences - which means you are going from anonymous press secretaries and PR people to someone who is photogenic and good on TV.
The press release from NIESR is a good example of why we need self-financing rules. They say that the furlough should be open ended because it will save 1.2m jobs. The cost of that would be massive and the economic gain small, yet here we are with a respected body essentially asking for unlimited use of self-financing to save an actually pretty small number of jobs when one considers that at the peak of the jobs boom the UK was creating 800-900k jobs in a year.
Again, moving the use of QE into the political sphere is fraught with danger, the government needs to address it or the demands on spending will become unimaginable and eventually we will end up with a huge inflationary crisis and weakening of the currency as asset holders bail out.
The government can't address it. No government can bind its successors.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Iraq has been a spectacular fail. The saving grace is the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he would have probably been dead before long anyway and his sons wouldn't have been tolerated. Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
Ironically, the removal of all Baathists was a direct response to the criticism of how, at the end of WWII, the new administrations in Japan, Italy and Germany etc were full of members of the previous order.
Those decisions are much less criticised in recent academic works.....
More likely it was because the US administration had forgotten the lessons it learnt at the end of WW2. They started out by trying to deNazify Germany and then realised that it would be impossible to run the country or put it back on its feet if everyone was got rid of. So they focused on the more senior and egregious members of the previous administration and realised that after a catastrophic war you need some level of normality and basic competence and order, something which Iraq did not get it.
The criticism off that policy was what got remembered - hence the deBathtubification.
The academic/political critics of the WWII policy quietly dropped their previous position on this in the memory hole.
The press release from NIESR is a good example of why we need self-financing rules. They say that the furlough should be open ended because it will save 1.2m jobs. The cost of that would be massive and the economic gain small, yet here we are with a respected body essentially asking for unlimited use of self-financing to save an actually pretty small number of jobs when one considers that at the peak of the jobs boom the UK was creating 800-900k jobs in a year.
Again, moving the use of QE into the political sphere is fraught with danger, the government needs to address it or the demands on spending will become unimaginable and eventually we will end up with a huge inflationary crisis and weakening of the currency as asset holders bail out.
The government can't address it. No government can bind its successors.
No, but they could at least start to address the issue themselves and not indulge in it too much now.
New Labour wasn't a good Government in my opinion. If you take Adam Smith's dictum:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
Iraq has been a spectacular fail. The saving grace is the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he would have probably been dead before long anyway and his sons wouldn't have been tolerated.
Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
I'll be honest, I didn't support his removal. He was undoubtedly a vicious, cruel, 'orrible dictator. But he wasn't a sponsor of Islamist terror (somewhat the contrary), or remotely dangerous in terms of 'WMD'. Much as I would hate to live in an autocratic regime, I would fear living in the chaos that followed it more. Deep down, Blair must find that decision very hard to live with.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
It's part of the plan to replace off the record lobby briefing sessions with publicly available press conferences - which means you are going from anonymous press secretaries and PR people to someone who is photogenic and good on TV.
Replace lobby briefings, yes.
But it is also yet another power grab by Number 10 as it means all news from departments must flow through it.
And to bypass parliament, as announcements can be made on BorisTV rather than to the House of Commons.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
It's part of the plan to replace off the record lobby briefing sessions with publicly available press conferences - which means you are going from anonymous press secretaries and PR people to someone who is photogenic and good on TV.
Yes. A portion of the press are upset because it is the removal of a cosy monopoly on "the inside track".
It will also mean that we will get to see the questions they ask. It is doubtful they are any better than the questions on COVID19
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
It's part of the plan to replace off the record lobby briefing sessions with publicly available press conferences - which means you are going from anonymous press secretaries and PR people to someone who is photogenic and good on TV.
Off the record briefings to favoured journalists will no doubt carry on. This gives the appearance of increasing transparency while actually decreasing it.
Most people can repair a bicycle: 80% of repair & maintenance is within the competence of anybody (Google is your friend, and most libraries stock a book on cycle maintenance), and the 20% that is tricky and usually needs an experienced bike technician is relatively cheap.
Your neglected Halfords 200 quid piles of shit that this scheme is aimed at will likely need new chains and BBs. That's not cheap at a bike shop who employ exclusively from the ranks of liars, idiots and thieves.
One man's Halford's 200 quid pile of shit is another's street weapon.
This brings us back to Gordon’s Golden Rule. It’s actually sound economics as long as you don’t keep changing the definition of where in the economic cycle you are and you don’t classify pay rises for the public sector as investment: http://journals.rcni.com/nursing-standard/standing-ovations-for-brown-as-he-pledges-support-for-nurses-ns.23.36.5.s2 Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
The daft one was Road resurfacing.
Badly needed? Yes.
Correct use of public funds? Yes.
An investment that would generate a financial return? You’re having a giraffe.
In terms of reduced costs for the people using the roads - reduced fuel usage, reduced damage to vehicles.... I would be interested to see a study on that.
Routine maintenance is highly needed, but needs to be funded out of income, not capital. NOT funding it enough will end up costing you a large chunk of your capital though.
Why does the PM need someone to communicate on his behalf? Is he too grand to do it himself or something? It’s the PM’s job to speak to the country he seeks to lead. If he can’t be bothered to do that he can resign and let someone else have a go.
It's part of the plan to replace off the record lobby briefing sessions with publicly available press conferences - which means you are going from anonymous press secretaries and PR people to someone who is photogenic and good on TV.
Off the record briefings to favoured journalists will no doubt carry on. This gives the appearance of increasing transparency while actually decreasing it.
And we must note this is a party appointment, not a government one. No doubt this party hack will be given authority over mere civil servants.
Comments
When the economy is growing is precisely when you DON'T borrow excessively. Excessive borrowing should be done countercyclically. You borrow during the bad times, not the good ones.
Keynesian economics.
F1: more markets up, currently not inclined to bet. Shame it's Friday rather than Sunday that's going to be hot (31C at Silverstone, apparently).
As for austerity being "counter productive" if it was then why did the UK under the Tories for the 2010s decade grow faster that the rest of the EU across the decade?
We had lower unemployment than the rest of the EU across the decade, faster growth than the rest of the EU across the decade and the deficit come down - and you think that was "counter productive"?
My recollection of the time leading up to 2008 was that
The economy was growing fairly well;
Government spending was going up even faster (hence the “sharing the proceeds of growth” line from the Tories);
Any attempt by the Tories to suggest that spending shouldn’t go up quite as fast was met with a (very effective) barrage about how many nurses they wanted to put out of work from Labour.
Were they cowardly to give in and agree to Labour spending plans? Yes. Were those spending plans unwise? Also yes.
I return to work on Monday after over five weeks holiday (I have rights to ridiculously long periods of leave) and have only travelled within a tight corner of the country. We have had a great time, and have seen and done lots of things we would have missed if we’d taken a fortnight in Sicily (our recent favourite).
Iraq.
Lisbon referendum.
Botched devolution and constitutional reforms.
Incredible complacency about financial bubbles, leading directly to the 07-08 crash.
Didn't sack Btown when he had the chance.
Overall a poor to terrible PM.
I know analogies in economics have serious limitations, but I think in this case it works. The situation at the moment is like using your credit card to pay for a hotel while you wait for your house to be repaired. Using QE under normal circumstances is like using your credit card to pay your rent.
The only way Brown's pre-crash deficit could be afforded is if we would never again have a crash. If you are arrogant enough to think that boom and bust has been abolished.
It can't be. It wasn't. That you still fall for Brown's arrogance after all that happened is beyond shocking. Do you seriously think Brown had abolished boom and bust?
The point is, however, whether for good or bad, when Lab then says "oh but the homelessness/poverty/joblessness/private ownership situation is an emergency which is killing people" the Cons have a far weaker case against.
Someone dying of poverty is just as important, and just as much of an emergency as someone dying of Covid-19. Just imagine Grant Shapps or Matt Hancock coming on to Marr and saying it's not.
You might reasonably add hanging on too long and NOT handing over to Brown earlier. By the time Brown did take over he had become bitter and twisted.
Why didn't they make you Chancellor as you clearly know more than Osborne did?
A sad tale, but does illustrate how difficult it is to define what is a Covid-19 related death. We are seeing all sorts of odd vascular events.
The man I posted as a great PM was great for cleaning up Brown's mess. He didn't pledge to maintain a deficit, pre-crash he was talking about bringing it down quite sensibly. The 2 year spending match pledge was political and did not make economic sense but made political sense.
The Tories attacked Brown's deficit in 2005 election too but the voters didn't care and gave Labour another majority. The Tories were right, the voters just didn't realise it until the crash came.
The irony is that someone dying of poverty in the UK is normally not because of a lack of money, but the incompetence of the state in getting that money to the recipient in a timely fashion.
There is arguably no such thing already as absolute poverty in this country, which is why we now use terms like relative poverty. Go to the third world and see slums and see what real poverty is.
Relative poverty will always exist.
Lack of Banking Regulation? The Tories called for less regulation at the time
Deficit Spending? The Tories pledged to maintain it pound for pound
Boom Bubble? The Tories declared they'd inflate it bigger to allow tax cuts as we "share in the proceeds of (bubble) growth.
If the Tories were so against these things why were they for them? Its like how they keep waving "there's no money left" as if it was factual. If there was no money left when debt was half then what it is now how would they describe what Sunak is doing? I am no fan of Gordon Brown, but saying that black is white and I always said so is as laughable as Shagger insisting he never told that room full of NI business people that there wouldn't be a border down the Irish Sea.
Indeed it was to a large extent the UK's bonkers housing market that meant it wasn't only investment banks selling CDSs that went pop in the GFC but domestic lenders also.
And this is of course not to mention Peter Lilley's proverbial warning about financial services regulation which proved so prescient.
The initial illness ranges from nothing at all to months of serious illness through to death and the secondary effects are unknown but it's becoming clear that while lungs are damaged by covid the heart may be as well.
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'
New Labour failed on two out of three. They were given a golden economic legacy, and had they not gone to war, and stayed on a (relatively) low tax and spend course, the UK would look very different today.
https://youtu.be/xDezfOdmiJE?t=235
I have noticed rampant inflation in bicycle components lately. This fifty quid voucher is probably going to increase prices even further.
The tax code has far longer than it was pre-Brown, and it could be tripled in size. That would not, however, automatically triple its splendiferousness.
Gordon’s inability to do the same and admit any mistakes he had made contributed significantly to his defeat in 2010. Here is an example:
https://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/factcheck+no+more+boom+and+bust/2564157.html
TL;DR they give him 4/5 where 5/5 is an outright lie.
To add to your example, the government declared a climate emergency last year, does that entitle them to invest magic money in the green economy to reduce the national dependence on fossil fuels? I don't think it does, but I think if you polled MPs most Labour and quite a few Tory ones would say it does. I'd actually like to see a cross party consensus on this that both major parties sign up to so that it would be very difficult for either to undo.
Anyone else been watching the current BBC series; the way the US commander who was trying to do a reasonable job fell apart was amazing, and the US removal of everyone in official positions 'because they were Baathists' extremely stupid. As the Iraqi contributor said 'we were all Baathists. We had to be.'
My point that recessions/crashes will always exist gets taken with by umbrage by people who seem to view them as something that should have been avoided too.
The increasing complexity of tax codes and laws in general is driven by the desire to remove judgment from the system. A perfect rule book that will always have the answer.
Humans are non-linear systems - unpredictable. The social structures they build are thus non-linear as well. This means that any attempt to build such a perfect rule book is unlimitedly bound to fail. Ever more rules will simply leave ever more rules to be written.
Particularly since the human reaction to the rule set is to change behaviour. In unpredictable ways.
It could be said that we see an attempt to create an AI engine (the law/tax code) - in which the training consists of a act-observe-legislate loop.
This perspective on the problem suggests a reason why the rules look increasingly like gibberish, can't be explained etc.
It also suggests that since the rate of change is far slower than human social change, that the attempt is somewhere between futile and self harming.
As I said, I'm not against the use of QE in this instance, however, there does need to be some rules on when and how self-financing can be used by any government in the future. It should be added the Bank's charter and have cross-party support. I don't think we should get to a situation where politicians are deciding what does and doesn't constitute an emergency worthy of self-financing depending on who is in power and what their political goals are.
This piece from a Covid-19 rehab centre in Wales is an eyeopener too.
https://www.channel4.com/news/new-service-launched-in-newport-to-help-covid-patients-recover
At the time of the crash that had not stopped. The reforms that he had introduced such as WFTC, EMA for school kids, PFI commitments, etc meant that public spending was on a strongly upward path at the time of the GFC. One of the reasons that people think that there was so much austerity (when in fact government spending continually rose in real terms) is the unwinding of those commitments.
Even if the GFC had not happened we were on a completely unsustainable path. This foolishness was then combined with delusion and dishonesty when Brown refused to allow Darling to publish a spending review that would have made it obvious that most of his cherished programs needed cut back severely so that the Tories would take the blame for "cuts". Crude politics but very much not in the national interest at a time when our finances were being looked at carefully by the markets we were so dependent upon. If we had not been fortunate enough to get the stability of the Coalition we might have had a very difficult time indeed.
Let me give you the opposite example. There was a politician who, on Black Wednesday, screamed and shouted and stamped his feet about how vital it was Britain stayed in the ERM. He’d been arguing for the importance of it for years. One little blip shouldn’t have made a difference.
As we all know, we made a mistake going in, and an even bigger mistake staying in as long as we did.
Who was the politician? Gordon Brown.
Who got the blame? The Tories, because they had also espoused this policy and were in power at the time.
Who deserved the blame? The Tories, undoubtedly. They were in power. They had failed dismally on every point. Did it matter that the Opposition were just as dumb? No. Because the Government are meant to know what they’re doing.
What was the result? Gordon Brown rode the wave of discontent at their following a policy he supported to ten years at the Treasury and three more as PM.
Investment should be designed to increase GDP or reduce costs for the government, that way it pays for the extra cost of borrowing it incurs. Health spending does this very indirectly at best (when there isn’t a pandemic of course) but it’s the easiest way of attacking the Tories if they refuse to match any increase in spending you can come up with.
"Black people were at fault for the GFC" is a racist myth
And the Brexit protests have all packed up and headed home.
Those decisions are much less criticised in recent academic works.....
Badly needed? Yes.
Correct use of public funds? Yes.
An investment that would generate a financial return? You’re having a giraffe.
A £8000 carbon race machine fully kitted out with Dura-Ace Di2 is not.
And of course, governments are supposed to have all the facts on which to base their policies. Oppositions do not.
This new appointment is about bypassing parliament, as well as the usual broadcasters.
MPs are either significantly underpayed for the job they do or they should regard it as a part time post and get a day job that pays the bills. Given that ministers can do their job while being MPs I’m inclined to the latter solution.
Edit: removed space before a comma!
Again, moving the use of QE into the political sphere is fraught with danger, the government needs to address it or the demands on spending will become unimaginable and eventually we will end up with a huge inflationary crisis and weakening of the currency as asset holders bail out.
A chap I know who owns a bike shop is doing a roaring trade, charging a fortune to add internal hub gears to bikes owned by very unfit, middle aged blokes trying to be Down Wiv Der Kidz.
The academic/political critics of the WWII policy quietly dropped their previous position on this in the memory hole.
But it is also yet another power grab by Number 10 as it means all news from departments must flow through it.
And to bypass parliament, as announcements can be made on BorisTV rather than to the House of Commons.
It will also mean that we will get to see the questions they ask. It is doubtful they are any better than the questions on COVID19
NOT funding it enough will end up costing you a large chunk of your capital though.