Our Shadow Chancellor recently kicked off a speech as follows:
... The answer is a new economic model for growth - set out in detail in this important economic policy document that we are publishing today. As the last major economy out of recession, and with the weakest recovery in the G20, we need change to get our country back on its feet again.
We cannot go on with the old economic model of the last decade. A model that depended on:
* a public spending boom we couldn't afford;
* an overblown banking sector;
* and unsustainable consumer borrowing off the back of a housing bubble.
These were the shaky foundations of the age of irresponsibility that left Britain so badly exposed to this economic crisis.
Brilliant stuff. He then goes on to explain that it will be Tory policy to get public spending down to the core functions of the state and a welfare safety net; how he will reduce the size of the banking system, get house prices down to affordable levels and make our tax system more competitive (or at least more conducive to wealth generation) by shifting taxation from incomes and production to land and property values; as well as liberalising planning laws to enable all the new power stations, roads, ports, factories and houses to be built.
Not.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Henry George Osborne
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9 comments:
Super-fast broadband is a massive lie by the tories. It doesn't help businesses. If you're in business and need more bandwidth you can go to a business park to get higher speeds, or get a dedicated line installed.
Instead, this is a giveaway to wealthy rural homeowners who will be able to get fast connections without having to pay for it.
JT, exactly.
The best way of funding broadband (or pretty much anything else) is either let the markets decide (and clearly, it is difficult for a cable company to make money from cabling the whole countryside, or else they'd have done so already) or to fund it by a tax on the uplift in property values, which George Osborne went on to explain in his speech. Not.
Apart from the recognition of "unsustainable consumer borrowing off the back of a housing bubble", isn't this just the same old shit, a load of empty promises?
When has the government ever been able to do anything about employment, apart from creating a lot of expensive quangoes that sound good and do sod all, or about "really effective local support for businesses" without ditto?
(I'm talking about direct action here, the preferred government modus operandi, not merely creating the right conditions for employment to increase.)
Funny how the housing bubble was mentioned last. Too dodgy to make a big deal out of peoples castles.
Labour couldnt cut civil servent spending, because they were funded by the civil servant unions.
The Torys can't deal with homeownerist and land value taxes, because those people are their core voters.
"New Economic Model"?
We just need Adam Smith and his L.V.T. BACK, oh and kick all the Marxists out.
Anon, exactly. Our economy (and the people in it) are being slowly ground to nothing between the twin millstones of Red Socialism (overt Statism) and Blue Socialism, i.e. Home-Owner-ism, which of course relied on a strong state to a) enforce landowners monopoly rights and b) to collect all the income tax to subsidise the landowners (for example, by propping up house prices).
AC1, didn't George explain that he was going back to Adam Smith? Ah ... nope.
Which George?
Henry George? Or George Osbourne?
AC1, Henry did; Osborne never will :)
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