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J30 strike: NUT, PCS, UCU, ATL call for a general strike on June 30th

SpineyNorman said:
Shame it wasn't EoY.

A few points after reading this thread - the tax payer funds ALL pensions for EVERYONE. Tesco pensions are paid for by the money customers spend there, same as everywhere in the private sector. We pay for a service/good and some of that money (nowhere near enough) is used to fund the wages and benefits of the workers who provide them - same in the public and private sector.
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Dear oh dear. Economics not your strong suit?
 
belboid said:
uhh, they lost because of their handling of the economy. You recall black wednesday (or was hat one a tuesday?) dont you?

They wouldn't have brought in the windfall tax, and would have been under constant pressure to cut other taxes. All of which would have meant less income.
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Yes, but the hypothetical scenario was that they won the 1997 election, and the only likely reason (beyond Blair being prematurely exposed as a corrupt, mendacious and generally evil bastard) for them to have won would have been that their post-1993 economic policy was a success, as it indeed was. As for cutting taxes = less income, that is not necessarily a given, and in any case might not have mattered if they didnt raise government spending.
 
agricola said:
Yes, but the hypothetical scenario was that they won the 1997 election, and the only likely reason (beyond Blair being prematurely exposed as a corrupt, mendacious and generally evil bastard) for them to have won would have been that their post-1993 economic policy was a success, as it indeed was. As for cutting taxes = less income, that is not necessarily a given, and in any case might not have mattered if they didnt raise government spending.
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Not when looked at in terms of % of GDP.
 
Blagsta said:
You can see from here

ukgs_line.php


that Labour's debt was far lower than the Tories ever was.
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er - thats not what that graph shows, look at 1991.
 
ElizabethofYork said:
Brown's semi-Keynesian "ideology" in which he follows the theory by spending madly in a recession to stimulate the economy, but in times of strong growth he ignores the counter-cyclical aspect of the theory and ... erm ... spends madly. Perhaps he was deliberately avoiding ideology by reverting to idiocy.
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Whereas you've managed to turn idiocy into an ideology.
 
ElizabethofYork said:
Dear oh dear. Economics not your strong suit?
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Tell me where I'm going wrong, please. It all comes from the tax payers' pocket - in the case of the public sector it's in taxes, in the case of the private sector it's the money paid for goods and services. So do you want to push down the wages and benefits of Tesco workers so your groceries will be cheaper? Actually, don't answer that one, I'm sure you do.
 
Blagsta said:
Not when looked at in terms of % of GDP.
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No, but then judging the success of an economic policy on one criteria alone is doomed to failure. Clarke massively cut the annual deficit, cut taxes, reduced unemployment, oversaw a fall in inflation and even set the course for the % of GDP fall that you are so keen to give Brown the credit for.
 
Maybe if EoY did some work instead of trolling Urban all day "her" employer wouldn't be struggling so much and might be able to offer "her" a decent pension.
 
Blagsta said:
Again, I'll give you that. It does show though, that the idea that Labour spent recklessly is a lie.
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Thats the thing though - Labour did spend recklessly, as even a brief look at what they actually spent the money on shows. If they had, for example, renationalised the railways, not relied exclusively on PFI, exercised even a modicum of control over contracts and purchasing, implemented tax credits properly, not invaded Iraq, restored the full grant for students or done many other things then they would have used their time - and our money - a lot better than they actually did.
 
ukgs_line.php


This one's even better. Look! We are down to the good ol' days of nineteenth century spending levels. (Apart from the first 70 years of course)
 
agricola said:
Thats the thing though - Labour did spend recklessly, as even a brief look at what they actually spent the money on shows. If they had, for example, renationalised the railways, not relied exclusively on PFI, exercised even a modicum of control over contracts and purchasing, implemented tax credits properly, not invaded Iraq, restored the full grant for students or done many other things then they would have used their time - and our money - a lot better than they actually did.
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I'd agree with that. But when the likes of EoY talk about reckless spending they mean Labour spent too much full stop - not that it wasn't spent wisely enough. Which is clearly a load of arse.
 
deficit%25GDP.JPG


That's my version of the debt as a % of GDP graph (thanks to Kanda for putting me onto the dataset, I should update it again, really - will do soon, the link will update automatically).

Let's just talk through what it shows us.

See that massive spike in the small inset graph, which shows almost a century up to 2008.

That tells us where 1939 to 1945 is.

You can see the steep drop just before that spike as Keynesian policies were tried after austerity had failed ('austerity' and 'trickle down' are both Hooverian terms, used back then).

Then the massive spike in war spending, and then a dramatic post-war drop in the ratio as the benefits of the spending and investment in rebuilding infrastructure put money in peacetime pockets, and it circulated, with a boom in technology and consumer goods, much of it created off the back of both discoveries made but also skills acquired during the war.

Then Thatcher comes along and it gets all bouncy.

Labour inherited a situation that was more or less identical to the one Thatcher inherited and only briefly improved before the impact of her policies bled through. And she had North Sea Oil.

You can see that Brown's attempts to 'abolish boom and bust' (by which I think he did mean a quasi-Keynesian approach of saving in the boom years to spend in the bust) does appear to have flattened the curve, but maybe that is just the effect of artificially suppressing bubbles.

The slight increase just before Northern Rock collapsed is partly North Sea Oil income declining (I think free spirit has posted the graphs for this elsewhere) and also perhaps the first warning signs of a problem in the economy.

The rest is all bankers bailout (direct reported cost so far ~£150bn) and the cost of increased benefits payments and reduced tax take from businesses which have gone bust and workers who have been made unemployed. Because the bankers fucked up.

There is no way you can make the argument that Labour fucked up with high spending. Apart from anything else, in 2007 Osbourne was promising to keep Labour's spending plans in place for three years. They had no problem back then, it is ludicrous to try and claim that it is Labour's fault when they wholeheartedly supported Labour's policy until it all went tits up.
 
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