What the Tories used to say would happen if the deficit was only halved by 2015 – alittleecon
Mark Hoban – in 2010 he was a Treasury minister, who gave the Tories’ verdict on plans to halve the deficit by 2015 which are unintentionally hilarious in hindsight.
It’s funny how things change, writes Alex Little.
The Conservatives launched this, their first election poster this week. One of their three boasts is “THE DEFICIT HALVED”. This has now been redefined as a success, but Jonathan Portes has dug up some great quotes from 2011 when they were saying something entirely different.
Interestingly, the Labour plan in 2010 was to halve the deficit by 2015, but using different methods. For what the Tories were saying in 2010, and what Alex thinks of both ideas, visit alittleecon.
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We seem to have become obsessed with reducing the deficit by any means necessary. Even the Labour party are walking that same line. We have had 6 years of this and its been a disaster.
To quote Gordon Brown in 2012 “the unfolding tragedy of a bankrupt Greece is only a symptom of an even more fundamental miscalculation: a wrong-headed conviction, widely held across Europe, that if austerity is failing, it is because there is not enough of it.” and “What Europe is experiencing may prove to be a permanent and irrevocable loss of prosperity.”
After WWII we had debt of 250% of GDP now it stands at 80%, but we still managed to set up the welfare state and nationalise industries. Taxes were much higher then and a lot of other economic factors were different, I’m sure no one want’s return to a 98% tax rate even for the highest earners but the basic principal is the same. We invested to build a better future.
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”
– John Maynard Keynes (1937)
Austerity didn’t work in the 1930’s and it isn’t working now.
I really could not agree more.