A Son of the Rock

What do you do when all around you are screaming, “We’re doomed!”?

It seems the answer is to add to the screams.

When one country starts to make cuts to its spending, that doesn’t matter too much. When they all do….?

Wasn’t this the sort of thing that brought about the Great Depression?

What sense does it make to take jobs in the public sector out of the economy when the private sector is manifestly incapable of taking up the slack? Not only do you not make as big a saving as it might seem – you lose the income tax on the pay of those who are not employed to fill any vacancies and possibly have to pay out benefits instead on top – you also lose the spending power of those jobs in their local (and the wider) economy and so lose the stimulus they might give.

It seems daft to me.

Wasn’t it government spending that brought an end to the Depression? I read recently Congress delayed the US recovery by several years by kyboshing some of FDR’s plans for a stimulus.

Savage cuts and an increase in VAT are both things I had a premonition near certainty about under a Conservative government.

Plus ça change….

Double dip recession (and worse?) on the horizon?