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“Come the new year, we will have yet another new government, which will be faced – amongst other things – with the consequences of a decade’s worth of cuts to services that, one way or another, the majority of us rely on.”
John Weeks, Coordinator of the PEF Council and Emeritus Professor of Economics, SOAS, writes for the PEF blog on the parties’ fiscal policies.
PEF Council coordinator John Weeks on the economic thinking at the IFS. Cross-posted from Open Democracy.
Brave New Europe’s Matthew D. Rose, reviews PEF Council Coordinator John Weeks’ new book The Debt Delusion.
The idea that a contraction in public spending could be more than replaced by private investment and enterprise – so-called “expansionary fiscal contraction” – is at best highly controversial.
Two articles on the same day on austerity by Financial Times journalists Chris Giles and Delphine Strauss demonstrate political orientation generating political bias.
‘In my new book, Austerity, we step back from the emotional reactions on both sides of the debate; and we carry out a much more forensic analysis, following the evidence – and only coming to a conclusion when all of it has been carefully sifted and considered’.
Of the nineteen UK governments since the Second World War, only two have torn up the rule book and tried to build a better future, instead of simply recycling the
“The Office of National Statistics recently released the public debt numbers for the second quarter of this year. As I show in my forthcoming book, Debt Delusion, the media and politicians misrepresent few public policy issues as frequently as they do the public debt. The misrepresentations begin with the basics, failure to treat the debt as an asset as well as a liability.”
“In recent years, even organisations like the IMF and the World Economic Forum have recognised the dangers of inequality. In particular, they have both drawn attention to both the high and rising inequality caused by austerity, and its damaging effects on both social cohesion and economic growth.”
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