Tag Archives: deficit

Steve Trevethan

On blood letting, Covid economics and Goldilocks

By Steve Trevethan | Thu 24th September 2020 - 8:54 am

“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain)

Blood letting is the withdrawal of blood from a patient to address illness, used for about 2,000 years. It harmed patients! William Harvey disproved its theory in 1628. Practice and professional endorsement continued into the 20th century via expert endorsement, “official” endorsement, public trust, inertia, fashion and lack of analytical thinking.

How powerful expert ignorance, endorsed by the powerful, politically and socially, and accepted by an insufficiently educated and ill-informed public can be! And this includes current economics and its “Deficit Myth”. (See Stephanie Kelton’s book of this title which informs this article.)

Our alleged deficit is a myth. We are a currency issuer, not a currency user. Our government does not function like a household which cannot issue its own currency. It cannot run out of money and is not solely dependent upon taxes and borrowing for its spending. “Book balancing” is a theoretical restraint. Real restraints are inflation, employment levels, natural and social resources and infrastructure efficiencies.

Efficient economy balance matters more than budget balance. Increasing “deficits” will not make future generations poorer nor will reduction increase their wealth. Such will depend upon our management of the actual economy.

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Peter Martin

Reducing the Government’s Deficit is not the same as reducing the UK’s Deficit.


By Peter Martin | Wed 6th April 2016 - 9:45 am

Now that the immediate fuss over the recent Budget has died down a little it is perhaps time for some more considered reflection on the nature of any criticism on the failure of the government, and George Osborne in particular, to make anywhere near the progress promised on the question of cutting the budget deficit. Maybe we can get it right for the next time it hits the headlines. The deficit problem is not going to be solved any time soon.

Naturally, the duty of an opposition is to constructively oppose, and so if the government’s deficit does not fall and total debt does rise, when the Government has a clear policy for just the opposite, then the Lib Dems, together with the other left of centre opposition parties, need to point out the failure of that policy. However, we need to be careful. That argument can be easily turned around. So we are in favour of even higher taxes and even more drastic cuts in public spending, are we? And when we say we are not, how does that chime with the public? Will they accept we are really being constructive? Aren’t they just going to think we want it both ways?

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Peter Martin

Are we targeting the wrong deficit?

By Peter Martin | Mon 1st February 2016 - 1:56 pm

 

Keynes and his contemporaries did not share our present day casual attitude to the imbalances we see in international trade. The monthly, or quarterly, trade figures were a regular and prominent feature of our business news, at one time, but we have to look much harder to find those same figures now.

Keynes’s proposal that international trade be separated from domestic trade by the use of a separate international currency, the Bancor, formed part of the official British proposals at the 1944 Bretton Woods  conference  which set the international financial and monetary arrangements for the post war period. Unfortunately this was a step too far for the Americans at the time. The proposal, had it been adopted, would have penalised the surplus nations, making it less attractive for countries to run large export surpluses and would have encouraged the deficit nations to re-align their currencies to reduce their deficits.

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Peter Martin

“How to Pay for the War,” or, Just about Anything! – Keynes 1940

By Peter Martin | Mon 25th January 2016 - 1:22 pm

Whenever a progressive party proposes a better education system, a better NHS,  better public transport or whatever,  the killer question is always “How are you going to pay for it?” The implication is that someone will have to pay by way of an increased tax bill or the money will have to be withheld from some other worthy project to compensate.

Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation had a similar, but much harder, problem to solve when it came to the question of how to pay for the war against Nazi Germany in 1939. If the principles of ‘sound finance’ which held that government budgets must at all times be balanced had been rigidly applied then surrender would have been the only option. Fortunately, the Liberal Party, and the country, had at their disposal the best economic mind of the 20th century in John Maynard Keynes who explained, in his 1940 book “How to Pay for the War” how an inadequately armed country of 40 million people, with an economy which had been performing poorly in the inter war years, could at least start to function well enough to take on a much better performing country, at least economically, of twice its population.

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Paul Johnson

The Independent View: IFS Director Paul Johnson – Balancing the books: some unpalatable choices

By Paul Johnson | Mon 6th October 2014 - 9:30 am

Paul Johnson is Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He will be speaking on ‘Balancing the books – tax and spending choices in the next Parliament’ alongside Ian Swales MP and Anne Fairpo of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, with BBC Scotland’s Business and Economy Editor Douglas Fraser in the chair, at 6.15pm on Tuesday at the SECC (Dochart 1). All conference attendees welcome.

We weren’t supposed to be here. When George Osborne delivered the Coalition’s first Budget in June 2010 the plans he set out suggested that the job of rebalancing the nation’s finances would be more or less …

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Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Eliminating the structural deficit is aiming for the wrong target

By Mark Pack | Mon 19th November 2012 - 10:53 am

HM Treasury logoThere is an appealing simplicity behind the idea of having a zero structural deficit. It is the policy the government is committed to, with its plans to eliminate the structural deficit. And it’s also wrong.

For all the problems in measuring the structural deficit accurately, the concept is a useful one – to measure what the deficit is, once you have allowed for where we are in the economic cycle. Or, as the FT puts it, “A budget deficit that results from a fundamental imbalance in government receipts and expenditures, as opposed to one based on one-off or short-term factors”.

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Mark Pack

Ed Balls denies that he denied there was a structural deficit

By Mark Pack | Fri 26th October 2012 - 1:24 pm

 

(Actually, it’s worse than that, for in addition Ed Balls’s claim that it’s only with hindsight that it’s clear there was a structural deficit doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny either.)

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Mind the gap – a sceptical view of the need for cuts

By Bill le Breton | Sun 21st October 2012 - 9:50 am

The UK’s economic position has deteriorated, government revenues are lower and welfare expenditure higher than anticipated, worsening the deficit so that austerity must continue further into this decade. Because of this deterioration a combination of increased taxes or cuts must be identified in the Autumn Spending Statement in December.

That is the orthodox view. It is based on the generally accepted proposition that the structural deficit should be eliminated. This has set off widespread debate as to whether the increased scale of the structural deficit should be eliminated by increased taxes (such as a Mansion Tax) or expenditure reductions and where these should be identified, with the Conservatives placing welfare cuts at the top of their agenda.

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Nick T

There are no easy choices when it comes to reducing the deficit

By Nick T | Tue 9th October 2012 - 12:11 pm

George Osborne’s statement that senior Liberal Democrats have agreed in principle to a further £10bn of welfare cuts in 2015-16 has prompted a strong reaction from many party members and a TV rebuttal from Nick Clegg.

But the issue is one worth pausing on, for it raises some important questions for Liberal Democrats.

Starting at the beginning, the first question raised is how we wish to close the deficit that will now exist in the first years of the next Parliament following the Chancellor’s decision in last year’s autumn statement to push back the period in which the

…

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Bill le Breton

Opinion: Clutching at straws

By Bill le Breton | Tue 15th May 2012 - 10:08 am

I have spent the day clutching at a couple of straws.

Last week in the tractor factory Nick Clegg appeared to confuse the ‘deficit’ with the National Debt when he said, “We have a moral duty to the next generation to wipe the slate clean for them of debt. We have set out a plan – it lasts about six or seven years – to wipe the slate clean to rid people of the deadweight of debt that has been built up over time.”

It sounded like a fail in GCSE Economics. But suppose he wasn’t mistaking the policy to eliminate the structural deficit by 2017 for a moral crusade to wipe the slate clean by removing the deadweight of the National Debt, all £1,300 billion of it.

At the other end of my straw was the realisation that Nick Clegg might have become an extreme Market Monetarist and was revealing his plan to re-establish Nominal GDP back to its trend line, even if that meant buying in the whole of the National Debt in the mother of all quantitative easing exercises.

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James Sandbach

The unintended costs and consequences of legal aid cuts

By James Sandbach | Fri 13th January 2012 - 3:00 pm

Inevitably when policy-makers design cuts packages they look at the short-term – savings achievable in particular department budgets within the spending review period. More holistic assessments, looking at where other public services ‘pick up the tab’ for another budget’s austerity measures, and the ‘displaced demand’ or ‘knock on costs’ that arise, are left for another day. This has been brought home with the Government’s legal aid reforms now before Parliament; an Independent report from a Kings College economist suggests the contribution of these cuts towards “deficit reduction” will be negligible, owing to the public costs of unresolved legal …

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David Thorpe

Opinion: Lib Dems Must oppose Labour’s ideological cuts in 2012

By David Thorpe | Thu 22nd December 2011 - 2:56 pm

If I were a cleverer person than I am, I would try to create a joke with a punch line to fit the following set-up: What’s the difference between a cut in government spending and an ideological cut in government spending?

That I’m not clever enough to create a pithy punch line is of no consequence, as it is no laughing matter.

Labour have sometimes tried to trail the line that the coalition’s cuts are avoidable, that there are the product of ideology rather than necessity.

This line lacked some credence because even as they …

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Zadok Day

Opinion: Danny Alexander is right

By Zadok Day | Sun 11th December 2011 - 11:52 am

As far as momentous television appearances go it was hardly Frost/Nixon, but Danny Alexander nonetheless made quite a stir on 29th November’s Newsnight. Our Chief Secretary to the Treasury confirmed that, post-Autumn Statement, the budget deficit would not be eliminated by 2015, and that further cuts would be required beyond then if this goal was to be achieved. For most of us this was stating the obvious, as well as in keeping with our manifesto policy on the deficit which called for it to reduced at a slower rate than that taken up by the Coalition, …

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Alex Marsh

Opinion: Oh, what is the point?

By Alex Marsh | Sat 3rd December 2011 - 3:28 pm

Having followed the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement and then watched Danny Alexander interviewed on Newsnight on Tuesday I have to say my initial reaction was “oh, what is the point?”. That was a reaction to both substance and process.

The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, as the IFS analysis demonstrates, hits the poorest hardest and those on middle and higher incomes less hard. Most would call that regressive. I’m sure some bright spark can come up with an argument that if you look at the data from a different direction – on the basis of expenditure not income, for example – then it isn’t …

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Nick T

Opinion: How much smaller would Labour’s cuts have been?

By Nick T | Tue 29th November 2011 - 2:27 pm

“Too far, too fast” – until recently you could scarcely switch on a TV without hearing Ed Balls repeating his four-word analysis of the coalition’s fiscal policy. It seems to be a line that Balls and Miliband are no longer sticking to. If I were to give them more credit for economic analysis than they deserve I’d speculate that this might be because they realised it is utter nonsense. More likely, their polling showed them that the public just weren’t buying it.

And the public would be right not to believe it, because, on a key measure, the difference between the …

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Nick T

LibLink: David Laws – George Osborne must stick to austerity Plan A

By Nick T | Tue 29th November 2011 - 9:57 am

Over at the London Evening Standard, Lib Dem MP for Yeovil and former Treasury chief secretary, David Laws, has a piece urging the chancellor to maintain the coalition’s deficit reduction plan to avoid importing the debt-driven eurozone crisis to Britain.

Here’s a sample:

Before the general election, many people said that a coalition would be weak and unstable. They don’t say that any more. By comparison with the eurozone and the US, our Government looks strong, stable and united. It is set to stay that way.

The Chancellor will be able to report that borrowing has been falling as planned. Borrowing from April

…

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George Kendall

Opinion: A deficit is a deficit is a deficit… Or is it?

By George Kendall | Mon 14th November 2011 - 8:45 am

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is an independent body, created to help us hold the government to account. It’s their job to check the government clears the structural deficit within this parliament. So it’s pretty important that we understand what is meant by “structural deficit”.

But what exactly is the structural deficit?

The word “deficit” is bad enough. A lot of people confuse it with “debt”, and that’s not just in inadvertent typos. However, if you stop and think, it’s not so bad. ‘Debt’ is what we owe, and ‘deficit’ is how fast our debt is increasing.

The structural deficit isn’t so …

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Helen Duffett

Consider the impact of cuts on women, warns Lynne Featherstone

By Helen Duffett | Sat 9th July 2011 - 8:49 am

From the Guardian:

In an interview with the Guardian, Featherstone issued her reminder that any public sector job cuts or other deficit reduction plans that failed to consider equality rules would fall foul of the law.

Under the Equality Act 2010, a new equality duty was introduced in April dictating that any public body must have regard to the equality implications of its decisions.

She said: “The equality duty means that the public sector will have to look at who is losing jobs and how those jobs are being lost because there is a duty to do so with regard to the

…

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David Thorpe

Opinion: The best way to get banks to lend more is to reduce the deficit

By David Thorpe | Mon 25th April 2011 - 1:58 pm

From among the blizzard of economic forecast, commentary and political point scoring which presently dominates the airwaves, there is very little consensus but the need to get the banks to lend more is something which brings all sides of the debate together.

The dividing line appears to be on how best to achieve this.

Those who subscribe broadly to the neo-classical or neo-liberal economic world view believe that banks will start wanting to lend as the economy recovers and businesses become more viable. This ‘leave it to the market’ approach is something which Lib Dems should (and do) reject, not just on …

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Rob Blackie

Opinion: We were prudent in opposition – time for Labour to follow our lead

By Rob Blackie | Mon 4th April 2011 - 3:50 pm

Labour have refused to provide any detailed alternative to the Coalition’s tax and spending plans. They have also implied that during their recent period in government that nobody challenged their irresponsible tax and spending plans. This is simply a lie. Not only did the IFS explain their irresponsibility as far back as 2003 , but so did the Liberal Democrats.

There’s an easy way to test how responsible we were while we were in opposition. Every year since 1992 the Liberal Democrats have produced an Alternative Budget setting out our alternative to the government’s tax and spending plans, as well …

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George Kendall

What the think tanks are saying: The IPPR on “How much is Labour to blame?”

By George Kendall | Wed 9th February 2011 - 4:46 pm

(On 14 January 2011, the IPPR published a paper by Tony Dolphin, Senior Economist and Associate Director for Economic Policy at the IPPR entitled Debts and Deficits: How much is Labour to blame?)

Tony Dolphin makes a key point in his paper, that Labour did not seem to realise how much it was relying on revenues from sources associated with rampant lending, such as the City and the housing market.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t develop this point.

Using the Treasury figures for the budget deficit, between 2007 and 2009, the deficit leapt from £37bn to £123bn. These figures are cyclically adjusted, …

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Chris White

Chris White writes: Hodge’s troubling amnesia

By Chris White | Wed 9th February 2011 - 9:55 am

Margaret Hodge was on the Today programme yesterday morning on behalf of the Public Accounts Committee. She lambasted the Government for its policies on the widening of the M25. Money had been wasted, we were told, because the option of using the hard shoulder had not been pursued. Moreover a shocking £80 million had been spent on consultants. She was also disobliging about PFI.

Many may agree with this. But what was not said was ‘Which Government?’ Ms Hodge carefully said ‘They’ at all times. What she meant of course was ‘We’. It was the Labour Government of which she was …

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Jonathan Featonby

Opinion: A hurting Lib Dem and the stagnant economy

By Jonathan Featonby | Sun 30th January 2011 - 6:12 pm

For the first time since his election as leader of the Labour party, I found myself agreeing with Ed Miliband during Prime Minister’s Questions this week.

With his new Shadow Chancellor sat next to him and in response to the news earlier in the week that the economy had contracted by 0.5% during the final quarter of 2010, Miliband urged David Cameron to think again over the upcoming spending cuts and VAT rise.

To make matters worse for the Coalition, the outgoing director-general of the CBI accused the government of putting politics before growth. Sir Richard Lambert argued that “politics …

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George Kendall

Opinion: what Ed Miliband should put on his blank sheet of paper – part 1

By George Kendall | Tue 21st December 2010 - 9:15 am

Ed Miliband has invited Lib Dems to make suggestions for his 2015 manifesto. In doing so, he is treading a well-worn path: from Tony Blair, who borrowed Alan Beith’s proposal for an independent Bank of England and a chunk of our policy on constitutional reform, to David Cameron, who borrowed a lot of our policy on civil liberties.

Imitation is a form of flattery, but it isn’t always sincere. I believe Ed Miliband spoke from the heart in his campaign for the Labour leadership, when he said that he would like to make us extinct. I’ve no doubt he would like …

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George Kendall

Opinion: why I still support the Lib Dems

By George Kendall | Tue 14th December 2010 - 12:38 pm

This has been a hard few months, and there’s been a lot of discussion about why some people no longer support the Lib Dems. But there’s a lot of us who still do. I thought readers of LibDemVoice might be interested in a thread where a few of us explain the reasons why we are still enthusiastic supporters of the party.

Here’s why I am:

Many leftwing commentators write as if there weren’t a £150bn deficit. If the coalition give this as an excuse for the severe cuts, some sigh in frustration, as if this were a tired excuse.

But the …

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John Fraser

Opinion: deficit reduction or political dogma?

By John Fraser | Thu 21st October 2010 - 1:14 pm

The effect of the ‘savage’ cuts as Nick Clegg called them last September are gradually becoming apparent over the course of the week. What both parts of the coalition insist is that these cuts are about deficit reduction and not a deliberate effort to roll back the state. There is a major aspect to these cuts however which are making this very difficult to believe.

If cuts were purely to balance the books, and the economic forecasts of the coalition were correct, there would come a time possibly during a hypothetical second parliament when some of the cuts could …

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George Kendall

Opinion: we shouldn’t blame the banks

By George Kendall | Wed 20th October 2010 - 3:17 pm

Conventional wisdom says that the deficit is all the fault of dodgy lending by the banks. But is it? If there had been no financial crisis, just a correction at the end of a credit bubble, would the deficit have disappeared?

The recession has certainly caused a temporary deficit. We’ve seen a reduction in GDP of about six per cent, and unemployment up to two and a half million. The temporary effects of the recession, a higher spending on benefits and reduced tax revenue, account for around £50bn of the deficit. But this will disappear as the economy recovers.

In response …

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Stephen Tall

How the media loves mixed messages (when they suit their own message)

By Stephen Tall | Sun 10th October 2010 - 1:25 pm

‘Conservative spending cuts are worse than Thatcher’s, says Alan Johnson’ shouts today’s Observer, reporting the paper’s interview with Labour’s incoming shadow chancellor.

If the election had turned out differently — if Labour had won, rather than suffering one of the worst defeats in its history — the headline could have read a little different… Imagine this headline:

    Alistair Darling: we will cut deeper than Margaret Thatcher

But wait, we don’t have to imagine that headline: it already exists, and was used by the Observer’s stablemate The Guardian back in March when reporting the then Labour chancellor’s realistic appraisal of the …

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John Pugh

Opinion: liberals should cut the deficit and support a strong state

By John Pugh | Wed 25th August 2010 - 2:53 pm

There is a myth that a desire to balance the books is a virtue only of right-leaning governments.

There is myth that those who want to shrink the state are more concerned than others about how the state raises money.

Deficit deniers in one corner – state shrinkers in the other.

But Liberal Democrats can act to reduce the deficit and be positive about the role of the democratic state.

What prompts any given government to run a deficit is usually circumstantial, prompted and encouraged by economists reading the runes. Reaganomics was based both on huge deficits and reducing the role of the …

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Helen Duffett

Clegg and Cameron’s joint letter to Cabinet

By Helen Duffett | Tue 3rd August 2010 - 2:25 pm

The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have issued a reminder of the Coalition government’s priorities in the form of a joint letter to their Cabinet colleagues.

The letter, aimed at the public just as much as ministers, includes a summary of the “central purpose that will guide all our decisions as a government.” The letter says that deficit reduction and economic recovery will be achieved by redistributing power from government to communities and people, and by governing for the long term.

It’s a message, amid criticism of the cuts that the government has announced over its first twelve weeks, that the Coalition is looking at the long haul.

Here’s the text of the letter in full:

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