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Tag: Budget

Labour should not back another Job Furlough

The policy is uniquely flawed, with multiple faults. Of course, if government throws over £60 billion of subsidies to a minority of firms and workers, that will be popular with the recipients. But a scheme should be judged by what it does for the many, not the few, and for its opportunity cost.

Why government debts and deficits aren’t the real economic worry

We had an exceptional public health emergency to deal with and, like other national emergencies, such as the Second World War, we simply had to spend the money to deal with it. Just as we didn’t panic about repaying the debt as fast as possible after WW2, instead building the NHS and the welfare state, so today we shouldn’t be panicking about it, either

PEF publishes blue print for the post-covid economy on 29th April 2021

“After decades of assault by state-shrinking ideologues, a collision of crises has revealed how only the power of good government can save us. Covid, climate catastrophe and Brexit crashed in on a public realm stripped bare by a decade of extreme austerity. Here all the best writers and thinkers on the good society show recovery is possible, with a radical rethink of all the old errors. Read this, and feel hope that things can change. ”
Polly Toynbee

The UK budget offered no vision for sustainable economic growth

The budget was singularly lacking in ambition when it came to the government’s role in creating a sustainable, inclusive and investment-led recovery.

There was no new green stimulus despite the UK facing a £100bn funding gap to reach its net-zero by 2050 target and despite its hosting of the global COP26 climate change summit this November.

Robert Skidelsky comments on the 2021 budget

“I am highly sceptical about this story of ‘pent-up demand’. A shrinkage in national income by 10% implies a fall, not rise, in national saving. Saving out of income may go up, but income itself is lower. That’s why it’s not like in a war, when you have full employment and rising wages, but less to spend money on. “

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