It’s the Bennite program without the wit or intelligence.
The banks remain largely unreformed and still mainly invest in property, overseas speculation, tax avoidance and financial derivatives rather than in UK industry. There has been no manufacturing revival and last year imports of traded goods exceeded exports by £106bn which is simply unsustainable.
Yes, and at least part of that traded goods deficit is paid for by the services exports of The City in overseas speculation and serving the financial needs of foreigners.
This can be paid for without any increase in public spending at all. Either a new round of quantitative easing could be targeted not at the banks, but directly into industrial investment, in consultation with business leaders and service providers.
You can see the baleful ideas of Ritchie here.
Or the mega-rich – just 1,000 richest British individuals have increased their wealth in the last 4 years by a staggering £190 billions according to the Rich List – could be charged capital gains tax on the increased value of their assets, which would be enough to generate more than a million jobs in two years.
And that’s particularly good. So we’re going to tax the people who have profited from employing people in order to encourage people to employ people?
I have a feeling that incentives don’t work in quite that manner.
The basis of the British economy remains highly dysfunctional, with an over-dominant City finance sector counterpoised by a shrivelled manufacturing sector.
The City is about 4% of the UK economy. Manufacturing is 12% or so. Eh?
The control of the money supply and hence of the direction of economic development, which has been franchised to the big five private banks over the past 30 years, needs to be brought back into public policy to ensure that primacy is given to manufacturing and exports over consumption.
That’s the MMT nutters like Anne Pettifor (and Ritchie of course).
Yet the only long-term sustainable future for the British economy is through a major expansion of hi-tech manufacturing tapping into the creative skills and inventiveness at which this country excels.
But he’s been talking about creating jobs! And the one thing we know about high tech manufacturing is that it doesn’t produce many jobs. There’s another point here as well. Manufacturing what in this high tech manner? We’ve the brightest minds of our generation all sitting over in Silicon Valley and trying to work out what should be that next high tech manufacture. They become billionaires if they get it right too. Most of them still get it wrong of course. And so who is to decide what will be manufactured here? In this wondrously high tech manner? Ann, Michael and Ritchie are going to knock up a few product designs over the herbal tea are they?
The man’s acting as fly paper for every bad idea about economic planning doing the rounds.