Gordon Brown Resigns

[Nudga]

They couldn't possibly do that as you'd still be paying your taxes and NI and you'd have more money to spend so you'd be putting your money back into the system both ways. I see it as a positive fiddle ha ha

[BillyStubbsTears]

Boomstick wrote:

RTID75 wrote:

I am getting so angry just thinking about a VAT rise, let alone when it happens (because it will). My work colleagues, whilst not telling me of their voting intentions, I am sure are a good proportion Tory voters. I tried to fight my corner, told them that VAT will rise, and listened with disdain as they insisted that the country was 'f*cked' and that recession (that they they handily forget is global) is Labour's fault.

Now it is becoming clear that what I said was true - that the thieving Tory gets will likely raise VAT, they're all pretending like they don't care even though none of us have had a pay rise for the last three financial years. The Tories are going to rape us all. I just hope all they, and all other working class people who foolishly voted the Tories in this time will smile cheerfully as they bend over to be shafted from by their own chosen establishment.

What I wouldn't give to have the skills to get out of the country right now...

The Conservatives are implementing painful things such as a possibe VAT increase because they simply NEED to sort out the budget deficit. The huge budget deficit created by Labour, by printing more and more money, creating more and more debt in a stupid attempt to keep the boom going. Its just 'kicking the can down the road'.
If you use the analogy of heroin addicts, they cant just keep shooting up larger and larger doses to remain high because they will eventually die. They need to be weened off it (depression) or even go cold turkey (crash). QE = heroin, in the case of the economy. Darlings VAT decrease wasnt free you know!! it needs to be paid for, and its up to the new government to sort it out.

Under nulabour there simply isnt the motivation for people to get educated and work hard to add production to the economy. Because its just too easy to live off benefits, why have a job when you can get paid for sitting at home doing nothing?
As for the employment figures, what good is it for the economy if a huge chunk is employed in the public sector? all these people are doing is taking their pay home to add more competition for goods and services. They arent actually producing anything. Its just like an extension of the dole queue.

Whilst im at it, i'd just like to mention how brown was quick to reap the praise during the (unsustainable) boom years. But as soon as the SHTF he was even quicker to call it a 'global recession'.

I'm really surprised how people cant see the bigger picture here, sure the Conservatives will implement hard policies, but they are simply sorting the mess created by nulab and there keynsian approach. Blame nulab for the mess.

Jesus wept Boomstick. Your posts are like the thick black dribble that would come out of a compost bin if the only thing you put into it was 10 years worth of Daily Mail editorials.

There's the bigotted (and I used the word advisedly) assertions that the country is chock-a-block full of idle dole scroungers. Of course we all know one - the work-shy have ALWAYS existed. But the FACT is that employment rate in the country under Labour was the highest in two generations, and the total number of people employed was the highest in the history of the country. EVER. So how does that square with these pub-bore comments that the country is full of dole scroungers?

You'll then say that this is all produced by Public Sector jobs. Apart from the fact that this is untrue (there are more private sector jobs than ever), public sector employment means teachers, coppers, nurses etc. The Right spout their bile about how the MoD employs more civil servants than soldiers. Of COURSE the MoD does. Because THAT is the nature of modern defence and warfare. The civil servants that they decry are the likes of my old mate who is in charge of a team engineering new protection for armoured vehicles, saving lives in Afghanistan. He's a brilliant engineer/scientist with a world-wide reputation. Four times in the last year he's had private sector companies try to head hunt him with big pay offers, but he's stayed in his job out of a sense of duty and a feeling that he can make a difference. THAT sort of person doesn't exist in Daily Mail-land, but they are utterly vital to the country. These are the stories that the Right don't want to tell, because in their world, civil servant=waste of space and money. But in the real world, if you cut HIS job, in the next generation you WILL need many more troops on the ground because they will be sitting ducks.

The fact is that a strong Public Sector is VITAL to the well-being of a modern democracy. Look what happened over time when the public sector was villified and starved of funds under Thatcher. A collapsed rail system. Shocking school buildings. Third-world medical facilities (A colleague at work had a three week old baby die in intensive care in 1999 because the alarm on the monitoring system didn't work. The baby had been born in a crumbling 130 year old maternity hospital. Three weeks later, a brand new, state of the art maternity hospital opened in the city - it had been planned, built and paid for under the Labour Government.)

As for your comments on the recession - I know that Little Englanders believe that everything past the White Cliffs of Dover is a dark wilderness, but the fact is that the recession WAS a horrific world-wide crash. EVERY SINGLE major economy suffered, many of them far worse than us. Japan and Singapore are two examples of countries that had deeper and more severe recessions than us. Germany's and Italy's were similar. France's was slightly less bad (after a decade of having SIGNIFCANTLY lower growth than us, so the net effect over a decade is that we have strongly out-performed both France AND Germany). Do you think Brown was responsible for EVERY country's recession?

You say that Brown blamed the world wide recession for our problems but took credit for the previous good years. With good reason he did that. The UK was the ONLY major economy not to have a recession between 1997 and 2008. So, even when the world wide economy had problems in that decade, Brown steered us through it. Just like he pointed the entire world economy out of the utter catastrophe that would have befallen us if the banks had been allowed to collapse. You want a nightmare scenario? Imagine if Brown had called an election in 2007 after he took over from Blair. Imagine if he had lost. In October 2008, George Osbourne would have been the one the world was looking to for guidance to avert the collapse of the Western Economy. God help us...

As for your comments on macro-economic policy - they are so fundamentalist that they would make a Taliban member seem like a CoE tea and cake old lass.

Every single major country in the world has used Keynesian policies over the last coupel of years to mitigate the effect of the recession. The alternative would have been a far, far deeper and more destructive recession. Your arguments about using a recession as a cold slap to economies are 30 years out of date. THAT is an arguable case when the problem is over-heating and inflation, like it was in the 70s and 80s. In THIS recession, the fundamentals of business and macro-economy were fine - the problem was that the credit system had collapsed. The answer to that was to underpin confidence, absolutely NOT to undermine it by saying, \"To the wall with you!\" If you had further weakened the situation  by stripping back public spending or not underpinning the banking system (as Osbourne wanted to do in 2007-08), the results would have been catastrophic.

Finally, you clearly don't understand Quantitative Easing. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Government debt. It is a MONETARY policy, not a FISCAL one. In simple terms, it is printing more money, not borrowing it. It is used when there is a serious risk of deflation. What it does, in effect is to raise inflation. It has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on fiscal debt. It was used by the Bank of England in this recession to prevent the economy from collapsing into an even bigger nose dive if inflation had gone seriously negative. There was a big lesson for this - Japan in the 1990s made every single wrong decision imaginable, and put a fundamentally strong economy into a downward deflationary spiral. They did this by following the same policies that Osbourne and Cameron suggested in 2007-08. Japan refused the introduction of QE for many years, and by the time it did use this policy, it has already had many years of stagant economic performance due to deflation.

Quantitative Easing did NOT, as you say in your Mail-speak, \"keep the boom going\". Firstly, there never WAS a boom under Brown - there was a decade of sensible, steady growth of 2-3% per annum, before the world wide crash (go loom at the figures - anyone can find them on the Internet). Secondly, QE only came in at the very depth of the recession. Exactly as it should do in any sensible economic policy when deflation is a serious threat. That is why it was used by the UK, the EU & the USA in 2008-09.