Dance Against Deficit Lies – The Video
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/18809989[/vimeo]
14 January 2011, Bank of England
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/18809989[/vimeo]
14 January 2011, Bank of England
Ed Miliband has come out fighting in today’s Times arguing that “a great deceit designed to damage Labour has led to profoundly misguided and dangerous economic decisions”. The truth is uncomfortable for the Government.
Ed Miliband writes (£):
“What is this deceit? It is that the deficit was caused by chronic overspending rather than a global financial crisis that resulted in recession and a calamitous collapse in tax revenues. One pound in every five of corporation tax disappeared in 2009-10. Their deceit ignores the evidence from around the world that a global credit crunch caused deficits to rise on every continent. The US and Japan face deficits of the same scale and for the same reason.
“Their deceit seeks to rewrite history, airbrushing out the fact that Britain’s debt at the outset of this crisis was the second-lowest in the G7; lower than it was under the Tories in 1997. And it forgets that neither of the two parties now in government called for lower spending at the time.”
How true. The Tories were committed to sticking to Labour’s spending plans until after the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008. As the graph below shows, it was only as tax revenue fell through the floor and “automatic stabilisers” – like unemployment benefits and increased tax credits – kicked in that the deficit opened up. Prior to that point, the modest Public Sector Borrowing Requirement was due almost entirely to capital spending – entirely acceptable under the old fiscal rules.
See the Chart: Public spending and revenue (% GDP) at
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/01/ed-miliband-is-right-to-expose-the-tory-deceit-on-debt
‘Coins fall victim to the cuts’ was the headline in the Morning Star, while the Daily Mail had ‘Coins on the cheap’. The Royal Mint, they reported, is to use cheaper metals in order to save £10m a year. Everyone else (except oddly the Luton and Dunstable Express) ignored the story, but it stuck in my mind—nothing demonstrates quite so ironically the economic illogic of the cuts regime, because the saving will cost the vending machine business many times that amount. Read more
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/17569033[/vimeo]
There are a surprising lack of convincing explanations as to why the capitalist class is pushing through the present unprecedented austerity drive – even at the risk of provoking both mass opposition and a double-dip recession. The following excerpts, from Hillel Ticktin’s recent articles in Critique, do offer an interesting partial explanation:
Read more at:
Government cuts – ‘Are they really as stupid as they seem’ by Hillel Ticktin