Tweedledum and Tweedledumber: Rishi Sunak wants to cut Covid-19-related spending before the pandemic is over. He’ll cause another huge recession – and more deaths – and Boris Johnson will let it happen because he is too stupid, or too greedy, to care about the harm it will do.
This is worrying from Richard Murphy at Tax Research UK.
He reckons Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is either so stupid that he wants to kill off even more of us with Covid-19 for the sake of a few extra coppers in cash…
… or he’s so stupid that he thinks the economy will get a huge boost if he puts it into another disastrous recession – possibly even a depression (which is worse).
All the noises Sunak is making at the moment are about stopping Covid-19-related government spending – indicating that he’s putting the Treasury into “full austerity mode”, as Mr Murphy puts it.
He wasn’t calling for a relaxation of Covid-related travel regulations because he thinks the pandemic is over – it clearly isn’t. But he’s indicating that he thinks he is because he wants to stop spending money on it…
… even though all the money he spent on it was specifically created for that purpose and hasn’t done any harm at all as it has washed through the country.
What a strange man.
Mr Murphy continues:
Sunak wants furlough to end, even though he knows this will significantly increase unemployment.
Sunak wants to cut universal credit even though his own backbenchers are indicating this will result in very real hardship in the UK.
Spending cuts are to be demanded.
He goes on to say that this is about maintaining ‘The Treasury View’ as put forward by Winston Churchill in 1929 – a false argument that there is only a limited amount of money and if the state uses any of it, then investment – and growth – by the private sector cannot take place.
It is a completely false view to take:
Churchill spoke when we were on the gold standard. But now we have a fiat currency, and the only constraint on the money supply is full employment at a living wage, which we are very far from achieving.
What is more, there is not a shred of evidence that there is any shortage of capital available to business right now. All business is absent of is ideas.
And to suggest the state does not add value in this era is an insult.
Churchill was economically incompetent.
His decision to follow ‘The Treasury View’ drove the UK into the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
Now Sunak wants his own great recession, whether working for Johnson or in his own account, given that his ambitions are so obvious.
And it seems clear that Boris Johnson is going to do everything he can to help. Already travel restrictions are being lifted.
Not only will the economy bomb, but Tweedledum and Tweedledumber are literally inviting more Covid-19 variants through the UK’s front door, and thousands upon thousands of us may suffer and die as a result.
Source: The UK cannot afford Sunak: he is a massive threat to our well-being
