When Austerity Meets Reality

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I'm not joking about it Hamish, it's just you have been banging on about austerity being wrong for a while.

Indeed.

And look what just happened.

The governments of Greece, France, Romania and Holland have all fallen within the last month.

And all because austerity without growth was no longer acceptable to their electorates.

Several people have proved you wrong, .

Over a hundred million people have just proved me right.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I
The far right were advancing BEFORE austerity. Infact the BNP did better before austerity than they did in the recent council polls, having lost all their seats.

I see you have not answered this point from an earlier poster who actually has some knowledge of the country.

Zorz wrote: »

Chrysi Aygi (Golden Dawn) went from 0.29% in October 2009 to 6.97% yesterday.

What happened in Greece in the meantime?

Did the neonazi, remnants of the Colonels' junta, royalists and fascists suddenly perfected human cloning?

CLAPTON

Generali wrote: »

Full employment in the post WW2 period was probably connected, in part, to a rather large proportion of the workforce having been killed by fighting in 2 massive wars in less than 30 years.

The conversion of the economy from a war footing back to a civilian one was not pain free as many seem to imagine. Try looking up the rations in the post-war period to see what people had to go through.

you have some economics training so you know you are talking rubbish

the number of potential workers affects the demand as well as supply

the supply of capital goods was very low as most production had been directed towards the war effort and other capital goods were depleted

in any event that doesn't explain how a debt of 250% allowed the NHS to be established and investment in housing and education and still allowed steady growth in gdp.

Loughton_Monkey

I suspect that austerity is not the problem. It's the "wrong type of austerity" that is causing hardship.

The reverse of austerity is profligacy, and that's what got us into this mess. For 20 years, governments in the Western world have ignored warnings:

1. They watched the exponential growth of wealth-creating business in China, India, and elsewhere. They couldn't work out that this gave up less money to spend, so they spent it anyway, and pretended that cheap imports were 'good' for us....

2. They watched the continual drift of call centres and operations centres to India, Indonesia, etc. and didn't understand that Western labour costs are unsustainable.

3. They became fixated simply with GDP, which has a major fault in assuming that all expenditure is wealth creating, when in fact very little of it is.

4. As long as people were spending [who cares it was on credit?], they fooled themselves, and the public, that everything was 'fine'.

5. What would have been massive unemployment was delayed by profligate spending in the public sector. Huge so-called 'investment' into mickey mouse Quangos, regulators, Computer Systems, and bureaucrats, teaching assistants, 'support staff', and if that weren't enough, mortgaged the silver by entering into PFI arrangements which will cost the taxpayer huge amounts for the next 50 years....

6. In the case of Brother Brown, his idiotic 'solution' of 'putting more money into the economy' by flashing out more and more 'tax credits' left right and centre believing that this gets into the economy an 'creates jobs'....

Austerity is essential, and might work, if it meant unwinding as much of the above as possible. Getting rid of non-jobs. Winding back the tax credits (except for the genuinely disabled and disadvantaged). Swingeing tax penalties on PFI companies who are raping public funds.

I see very little real austerity happening. I just see a lot of talk, a lot of fractional claw-back over the next 10 years (pensions), and a lot of the old easy targets which I summarise as 'sacking a few more bin men'.

chucky

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

And all because austerity without growth was no longer acceptable to their electorates.

Unfortunately that's something that's not understood very well, economic policy isn't like a household budget where you can just reduce spending. The defenders of the Conservatives will say cuts are the only answer but it's not, investment and spending is needed too. The other solution by old Labour of spend, spend, spend isn't the answer either.

It has to be something in between with slower levels of cuts and strategic investment.

pqrdef

Generali wrote: »

Full employment in the post WW2 period was probably connected, in part, to a rather large proportion of the workforce having been killed by fighting in 2 massive wars in less than 30 years.

Brit casualties weren't that heavy in WW2. But after the war we rewarded ourselves with massive expansions of the housebuilding and social security industries. Zillions of jobs there.

But full employment is a relative term. The women who did every job going during the war were told in no uncertain terms that their place was now in the kitchen at home, where they wouldn't take jobs away from men and wouldn't count as unemployed either. Many jobs, like bus driving, were pretty much closed to women for decades, even when we started recruiting Commonwealth immigrants to come and do them.

Generali wrote: »

Try looking up the rations in the post-war period to see what people had to go through.

Dunno about the middle classes, but the working classes (still the large majority) weren't exactly sitting on pots of cash with nothing to spend it on. Rationing wasn't their bottleneck.

vivatifosi

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Indeed.

And look what just happened.

The governments of Greece, France, Romania and Holland have all fallen within the last month.

And all because austerity without growth was no longer acceptable to their electorates.



Over a hundred million people have just proved me right.

I saw an article on the news this morning stating that since the recession started, half of the governments in the EU have fallen, either because they are shouldering the blame for the "before" or "after". So while austerity is not acceptable to many, neither is how we got here.

vivatifosi

chewmylegoff wrote: »

The BNP went from 1% to 6% in the 2009 euro elections. We don't seem to have become a far right pariah state yet.

The Greeks are right effed off, but I don't think there is really anything to suggest it's anything other than effed off protest voting at this point in time. The idea that unless we all abandon austerity (or as it's known these days increasing public spending a bit less quickly than before) we'll all be Nazis by Christmas is laughable.

We won't all be nazis by Christmas, but here's my issue with it. Because in the UK we have a first past the post system, with a relatively small percentage of the vote it is almost impossible to get representation. That could be seen as a bad thing, as demonstrated by the recent apathy in UK local elections.

The flipside of that coin however is that where you have a system of some form of proportional representation, as in Greece, then those people do get representation. In the case of Golden Dawn they have achieved 21 seats in the Greek parliament, approximately 7% of the total. The Liberal Democrats hold less than 9% of the seats in the UK Parliament, but due to the fact that there was not a majority at the last election they hold a degree of power that is shaping the political agenda. What would be scary would be if Golden Dawn was able in some way to shape the agenda by virtue of its winning seats, rather than winning votes as the BNP has done.

pqrdef

More likely the new Greek government, if one can be formed, will fail after a short reign of chaos. And who knows what the voters will do next time.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

vivatifosi wrote: »

In the case of Golden Dawn they have achieved 21 seats in the Greek parliament, approximately 7% of the total. The Liberal Democrats hold less than 9% of the seats in the UK Parliament, but due to the fact that there was not a majority at the last election they hold a degree of power that is shaping the political agenda. What would be scary would be if Golden Dawn was able in some way to shape the agenda by virtue of its winning seats, rather than winning votes as the BNP has done.

Absolutely spot on.

For a neo-nazi party like Golden Dawn to win 21 seats in a modern European parliament is simply not acceptable.