When Austerity Meets Reality

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lostinrates wrote: »

How do we acheive either of these ends?

We've got no idea. That's why the growth predictions that were being made in 2010 were so hilarious.

The [STRIKE]Bullingdon Club[/STRIKE] Cabinet hasn't a clue about that, or anything else much. The bosses just want to use the excuse to sweep away elf-n-safety, employment protection, and as many other regulations as possible, and walk away from their pension liabilities. Which will fatten their profits and pay packets, but won't create any growth. But we've heard all that before, and nobody's fooled except the usual suspects on the Tory back benches.

Of course it's not difficult to increase production, when you've got a surplus of labour and no critical shortage of anything else. You just recruit people and get them working. There's plenty of work needs doing. It's child's play for a government to increase GDP - they have to struggle to stop themselves doing it.

The difficulty only appears when you add the artificial constraint that the production has to be "profitable" (according to a particular notion of trading and accounting).

But we have a government that's constrained by ideology. It's not interested in any form of economic activity that has to be paid for via taxation or capitalised by public funds. It wants private-sector growth or nothing - it would rather have recession than grow the public sector.