Are you a Tory Bomsh?
10 O'Clock Live - Series 1 Page 22
F**K! Outed again!
Quote: Bomsh @ February 12 2011, 5:37 AM GMTYou are just trotting out a tired Tory libel here.
My understanding of libel is that it has to be untrue? And why is it a Tory libel when it's not a particularly partisan thing to say? This is the view of many of the voters whom Labour need to win back, so telling them their views are baseless and malicious seems counterproductive to me. Oh well...
You may be correct in saying that no government specifically plans for an economic slump, however, with or without the normal "economic cycle", you don't need to be an economics genius to realise that if you spend far more than you raise in taxation then eventually you're f**ked. Anyone who's ever run up an masssive overdraft at their bank knows the misery of this particular policy. The Labour argument has never been about whether it's a good idea to spend vast amounts of taxpayer money to interfere with every aspect of society, but simply a case of how vast a vast amount to spend. Would you trust your mate to spend your money better than yourself? OK, well extend that argument to allowing politicians (who are even more self-interested, self-important and deluded than your mate) to spend it for you. There's a good incentive to spend your money on yourself wisely; less to spend someone else's money on yourself wisely; and pretty much no incentive to spend other people's money on other people wisely. This last option is a large part of the reason politicians being too much in control of the pursestrings is a bad idea: they spend the money badly. After the initial PR exercise of sticking to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in 1997, Labour went on a shopping spree which would even put my girlfriend to shame. Seriously, they spent like there was no tomorrow - which in an essentially two party liberal democracy there isn't, of course. You simply keep on spending (and mostly over-spending) until you run out of a) money and b) crap/misguided ideas of what to spend it on. That is, I'm afraid, the story of the New Labour project in a nutshell. (And I'm not saying that Tory spending is any wiser, but at least there's usually less of it.)
The underlying misconception in Labour/socialist economic ideology is a simple one: you don't improve the lot of the mass poor by punishing the well-off few, or by politically micro-managing free trade. Adam Smith set this out very clearly over 200 years ago in The Wealth Of Nations, but successive Labour chancellors have either dismissed its (relatively) simple truths, or chosen to wilfully misinterpret them. For anyone unfamiliar with it (as I certainly was) I suggest getting hold of PJ O'Rourke's analysis of Adam Smith and his book (On The Wealth Of Nations) which, as well as explaining how money and trade works very well, also has some laughs in it - something that's now lacking in this thread, hence I'll shut up. 
Quote: Nat Wicks @ February 11 2011, 5:24 PM GMTYep- that was only days before I went off on stress leave
Haha.
I did save the bank £3.7 in investments that day though.
£3.70? They must have been over the moon...
Quote: Tim Walker @ February 12 2011, 7:43 AM GMTif you spend far more than you raise in taxation then eventually you're f**ked. Anyone who's ever run up an masssive overdraft at their bank knows the misery of this particular policy
Macroeconomics and microeconomics; two very different things.
Quote: Tim Walker @ February 12 2011, 7:43 AM GMTThe underlying misconception in Labour/socialist economic ideology is a simple one: you don't improve the lot of the mass poor by punishing the well-off few, or by politically micro-managing free trade.
I am not sure you improve the lot of the mass by allowing the well-off few to become exponentially richer and for the gap between them and the poor to become ever wider, which is what in fact happened under New Labour. Poverty is largely a matter of perception and comparison, the happiest societies tend to be those where everyone has very little.
As for micro-managing free trade, no one who had any dealings with DTI/BERR/BIS/whatever would accuse New Labour of that! The economic paradigm that held sway under Thatcher remained unchallenged, as evidenced by the accelerated decline in our manufacturing base. Under Gordon Brown the wisdom of the market continued to be dogma. Other countries pay lip service to free trade, only the economic ideologues of the UK actively embrace it.
New Labour's huge error was to believe that the tax revenue from a retail sector buoyed up on cheap credit and from a City that had parasitised Global capitalism, could be used to regenerate those areas of the country that had been laid waste by Global capitalism, and that this could be done by creating public sector jobs, rather than through investment to stimulate an industrial revival, supported by a necessary degree of protectionism.
A lot of New Labour spending was worthwhile, and I would suggest represented a better investment for the future than might have been achieved if the feckless British public had been taxed less; though Blair and Brown were incredibly gullible when it came to consultancy industry snakeoil salesmen (see David Grieg's Plundering the Public Sector), with the result that a lot of money was undoubtedly squandered.
Brown got caught out though when, having run up a huge Budget deficit buying popularity ahead of the election, he was then obliged to bail out his friends in the banks, leaving him with an even more massive debt to service. Be that as it may his overall economic strategy was fundamentally flawed, combining the worst elements of unchecked capitalism with welfare as an alternative to jobs. Basically the New Labour commitment to economic redistribution amounted to little more than bread and circuses for the plebs.
Charlie's hair was at its funniest yet.
Quote: Nogget @ February 12 2011, 9:45 AM GMTMacroeconomics and microeconomics; two very different things.
You should have been an adviser to Gordon Brown.
Quote: Tony Cowards @ February 12 2011, 9:41 AM GMT£3.70? They must have been over the moon...
Damn, that was supposed to say £3.7 million!
Quote: chipolata @ February 12 2011, 11:30 AM GMTCharlie's hair was at its funniest yet.
Has his side-parting switched sides? ...It looks sort of different.
Quote: chipolata @ February 12 2011, 11:30 AM GMTCharlie's hair was at its funniest yet.
Maybe they can make it the 5th member of the team.
I've finally been beaten into submission by it. I like his hair now.
Quote: Tim Walker @ February 11 2011, 4:45 PM GMTEvery time Labour are in power they manage to screw-up on the economy. And every time they do so, they add to the number of voters who realise that they simply can never be trusted to hold the purse-strings until they fundamentally budge from the same redistributive agenda that they've been (unsuccessfully) pursuing for the last 100 years or so.
I've got some good news for you; inequality had increased in this country when Blair and Brown left office. In fact both Heath and McMillan had a better commitment to a redistributive agenda.
Conservatives as evil and Labour as incompetent?
It's like Spitting Image never left.
More on topic, I've had litte time to tune back into this. If it's a choice between this and QT, it's pretty obvious what I'd go for.
This?