MMT – blah blah – resources – blah blah – just print the money. And then:
It is estimated that the fiscal multiplier for UK healthcare spending currently lies between 2.5 and 6.1. This means for every £1 spent on the NHS approximately £4 of economic activity results.[10] If you had a cash-back card that gave you £4 back for every £1 spent, you would not cut back on your spending! Only when we reach a position of over supply when NHS staff wait forlornly for patients to present do we reach a point where the multiplier falls to below one. We are, at present, an unsafe distance from a workforce oversupply scenario.
As a sovereign nation, the UK can always afford high quality universal NHS healthcare. Money is essentially an accounting system designed to facilitate our collective activities and development. Fiscal policy needs to be activated to meet the needs of our society as there is now observable failure of the prevailing reliance on monetary policy and preservation of rent-seeking private interests. It is evidently wrong to assert that healthcare access and quality is limited by the availability of money. The constraint, in truth, has never been the potential availability of money, but the desire to resource the NHS appropriately. In the words of John Maynard Keynes, ‘Anything we can actually do we can afford’.
The constraint is resources. And the constraint is not the totality of resources but the varied things we want to use our resources to do. We currently, in the UK, use about 11% of everything to produce health care. Perhaps 10% or so.
We do not wish to use 100% of everything to produce health care. Food being – just as an example – something that human beings have shown they like to have. So too housing, TV, foreign holidays, name brand sneakers and all the rest.
The limitation on health care is how much of everything are we willing to devote to health care? Definitely not enough to cure all of everything. Even not enough to cure all of everything that can be cured.
As it happens the country that comes closest to expressed preferences in how much should be spent on health care is the US at about 18% of everything. Getting to that number requiring that we recognise that the US is a richer place and health care is a luxury good. And don’t the lefties bitch about that?
“means for every £1 spent on the NHS approximately £4 of economic activity results.”
He thinks that £4 of economic activity is £4 profit?
Does MMT say how nurses and doctors get created in sufficient numbers to staff this expanded NHS?
When the NHS was created the government said that it would pay for itself by reducing working hours lost to illness. That hasn’t been true for a long time, if it ever was. The majority of people in hospital are not economically active.
What is the fiscal multiplier for digging holes? And filling them back in?
The fiscal multiplier for ___________ (any Lefty favoured activity) is HUGE!
We should SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! It doesn’t cost money; it MAKES MONEY!
Reductio ad absurdum, give a pound to a beggar on the Tower Bridge, and the UK can finance the world.
“This means for every £1 spent on the NHS approximately £4 of economic activity results”
Even if that’s true, how much economic activity would result from doing something else with the money? That’s the sort of range that people have calculated for the economic cost of taxation (each £1 of taxes causing several pounds of economic damage, because of the things people can’t do with the money the government takes off them).
They never explain why all the money we’ve already spent hasn’t paid for itself though……..its always the new spending that does that, never the old. Very odd……….
It is estimated that the fiscal multiplier for UK healthcare spending currently lies between 2.5 and 6.1.
Any work that has a spread like that and reported to the first decimal place needs to be considered with a slab of salt. In this case it was work done by a physicist and anaesthetist, so should be discarded all together.
BiND, they use a decimal point to show they have a sense of humour.
“This means for every £1 spent on the NHS approximately £4 of economic activity results”
I wonder if that applies to tax evaded in the black economy?