jamest wrote:Spearthrower wrote:jamest wrote:... the notion that the NHS is not going to exist nor that you will not have access to medical care after The Conservatives won on Thursday/Friday, is utterly ludicrous. I mean, you might be forgetting this but we've already had 9 years of a Tory government in a financially crippled Britain/World.
The NHS has been crippled by the last 9 years of Tory government!
No, it's been crippled by a Tory government that inherited debt to levels that have almost made this country bankrupt. Or do you think that the Conservatives imposed austerity upon its people for a laugh?
It's a bit like waking up yourself and realising that you're thousands of pounds/dollars in debt and can no longer afford to pay the interest. What do you do? You make severe cuts in your own spending. At least, that's what most reasonable people do.
"almost bankrupt" and "Labour ruined the economy" have been astoundingly successful propaganda (lies) the Tories ever sold. People like jamest here lapped it up, didn't they?
What does a business do in a downturn? Get rid of all the staff, sell off all the stock in a fire sale and barely survive on soup while hoping that things will get better? Or invest in the business, open up ne markets, retain key staff and build a butter future for themselves?
You can't cut your way out of recession. Only economic growth can do that. Plenty of economists have criticised austerity for slowing the recovery that Labour kick started by keeping the banks open and increasing liquidity through QE.
Losing experienced people is very expensive. You loose their productivity then, with increased stress on those still working, which increases attrition.
if you are lucky and things improve without your efforts, you have expensive recruitment and training to fund just to get back to where you were before you started cutting.
Austerity measures at national level have not helped regions to recover following the 2008 economic crisis, according to a new LSE study of the UK and other EU countries.
On the contrary, high public debt countries have been more successful in sheltering their regional economies, the research concludes.
Dr Riccardo Crescenzi and Dr Davide Luca of LSE’s Geography & Environment Department and Dr Simona Milio of LSE's European Institute mapped the impact of the crisis across the 27 EU member states on key performance indicators. They then explored the potential links between pre-crisis economic factors and post-crisis economic performance that may have exacerbated or mitigated the short-term contraction of the various regional economies.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/ne ... study.aspx
Indeed that is one real criticism of membership of the Euro in this period that the EU insisted that Eurozone countries use austerity to constrain debt when growth was needed.
The Institute of International Finance says austerity probably damages economies trying to recover from the great financial crisis.
Since 2008, GDP growth in the US has been 10% greater than in Europe, the IIF says. In terms of GDP growth per capita, the reduction was 5%. Fiscal tightening in Europe was the main difference.
Trend growth in the US was double what it was in Europe following the financial crisis, the IIF says. Prior to 2008, they had been the same.
"Fiscal austerity is a mistake," IIF Managing Director & Chief Economist Robin Brooks tells Business Insider.
https://www.businessinsider.com/austeri ... ?r=US&IR=T