We paid off lend lease in '95, did we not?
Hello. Perhaps someone can answer this question for me. The author of this article indicates that Corbyn has been attacked by the left-wing establishment of his party, and the author then provides a link. However, when I clicked on the link, there was no Mention of any left-wing establishment, instead, the discussion is about neo-liberal members of Corbyn’s party. Was the author attempting to be ironic when he termed these people “left-wing”?
That’s not how macro works. The UK was never more in debt than just before the Victorian era during which, instead of becoming Weimar Zimbabweslavia, it created the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
It’s not how much in debt you are (well it isn’t if you get to issue your own currency and set your own fiscal policy) it’s what you do with the money. America, likewise, was heavily in debt (and spending vast sums with high taxes) just before it entered its largest period of economic expansion just post WWII.
An important difference is that social programs even if marginally well implemented spread their effects around effectively and boost aggregate demand (which is going to be the bugbear of international macro for the foreseeable future it seems) while bennies for the rich just run through the economy and end up inflating this or that bubble[1].
So, no, the policies listed above will not necessarily tank the economy. They might if managed poorly, but the ones pushed by the Tories are actually far more risky. They burn children hoping to appease the Moloch of austerity and while such stern measures give the appearance of being effective, they, so far, haven’t worked once despite being rammed through in many a poor country by the diktats of the Troika.
[1] 'Cause the poor want money to put their kids through college or to buy a dishwasher and tend to put any windfalls to these economy-boosting purposes. The rich, on the other hand, want somewhere to park their money and so only end up creating a very bullish securities market which bubbles up with leveraged speculator cash until the primary investment stream dries up and then, well. Then 2008.
The Labour party has an image problem. Corbyn, too, in fact. It stems, I think, from an unbalanced target demographic. Labour wants to both provide a robust lefty program for the underclass of Brittain but also to provide the middle class with their conscience-salving indulgences. Empty, meaningless feel-good policies that alienate what should be the party’s base in order to make a certain segment of the chatterati feel okay about making twenty times as the common working class oik.
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Yes, hence his use of sarcastic quotes.
nope. should I?
Back in the 1960s the Mirror had a cartoon strip - The Perishers - which would now be regarded as left wing political indoctrination. Think Peanuts with added Marxism, but without the angst. I suspect that at least one PhD dissertation compares the two in terms of the different societies on each side of the Atlantic. On one side the idea that life is a struggle, psychopaths will kick you in the teeth (or remove the ball as you prepare to kick it) and nice guys come last; on the other the idea that society is there to catch the people who fall through the structures and that marginalised people have strength and dignity.
Commie nonsense.
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You mean the last two people will have been kicked out and the lights turned off? Sounds about right.
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It’s like we’ve gone a full 180 degrees from the old Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob says everyone is secretly a Republican.
Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside, you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalise criminals and rule you like a king!
Now people feel obliged to vote for a “sensible” right-wing candidate, but they secretly wish for a firebrand lefty to come along and level the playing field.
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I don’t think people debating public policy want to have reality intrude on them.
The whole debt thing is a colossal red herring. If you don’t have money to run a public education system and you finance it through debt, obviously the next generation is going to be wealthier to a degree that the debt will be worth it. I’ve heard estimates at the effective returns of primary education running 20% to 70%, but you’d have to be stupid to think it’s not as good at 10% or 15%. If you can borrow at 2 or 3 (which is what you can borrow at these days) and invest at 10, and you are paying down your debt, you are just plain stupid.
Not everything is so obviously a good idea as primary education, so people can argue that the thing we are spending money on aren’t effective enough to justify, but whether you have a debt or not, the government shouldn’t be spending money on dumb things to spend money on and should be spending money on the best things to spend money on.
The fact is that there are a ton of good ways to spend money that pretty much pay for themselves immediately, let alone the long term benefits. Single payer public health care costs less money than not single payer public health care. Public daycare costs less money then not public day care. Austerity in the name of paying down debt is foundationally stupid and no one who has passed elementary school math should believe in it.
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That might even be stating it mildly. From a Keynesian perspective public debt is good where it influences demand-side spending. I would go farther, and say that once politics are removed from the equation, public debt is effectively meaningless- the U.S. national debt should be proof enough of that, as 9 years of demand-side Keynesian QE has ballooned the debt while wealth piles up for those on the receiving end of the expenditures (it should be seen as no accident that Bankers accepted Keynesian gov’t spending at the precise moment that it would benefit them the most…)
The reason all this deficit-spending hasn’t been able to shake off sticky GDP growth is because supply-side is a blatant lie. Debt is smoke and mirrors, and oddly enough it was Hitler who kinda proved it when he made the Mark fiat (Ellen Brown has a good starter essay), which like many things Hitler did, was influenced by a U.S. policy, in this instance Lincoln’s Greenbacks.
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