When is this cuts insanity going to end?
March 8th, 2010It is almost unbelievable that all three political parties are still obsessed with savage cuts/slash and burn as the panacea for the country’s ills when all the evidence shows that it is counter-productive and dangerous. When are the political leaders going to learn sense?
* As Richard Murphy of the Tax Justice Network has shown, sacking a £25,000 public sector employee saves just £2,000 when the income tax, national insurance and VAT contributed by an employee is lost and social benefits are paid out in full (rightly) – and that’s without the depression, illness and possible loss of home that can result,
* As the 60 economists who recently wrote to the Times spelt out so eloquently, it runs the very real and dangerous risk of provoking a double-dip recession and postponing a recovery for many further years,
* As Roosevelt’s US discovered in 1937 and Japan in the 1990s, tightening monetary and fiscal policy prematurely can easily unravel the whole of the previous fiscal stimulus and open up the economy again to the recession abyss.
Pursuing this course should be political suicide. How can the voices of reason make themselves heard?
March 9th, 2010 at 12:12 am
Your interview with George Noory of Coast to Coast was marvellous. I was listening intently and focussed on every word.
There was only one answer which i didn’t understand, couldn’t grasp, and i wanted GN to follow-up with you, but he didn’t.
He asked you, if there’s a being who created everything, then how did ‘it’ start? i.e. ‘Who designed the ‘designer’? (as GN so well put it). You answered that the question doesn’t make sense etc., but you didn’t explain your answer and i didn’t understand your answer at all! I realise that whether we believe in a ‘creator’ (i don’t) or not, the question remains – who started it all? – but i think your answer was very unsatisfactory.
Thanks for reading my e-mail (if you did).
Carol (Coast to Coast avid listener).