So the real question is not, is there a deficit? The real question is, why is there a deficit, and what does it mean?
It’s because the gurning morons are pissing our money up against the wall.
So the real question is not, is there a deficit? The real question is, why is there a deficit, and what does it mean?
It’s because the gurning morons are pissing our money up against the wall.
And because his theory that government spending creates more money than it costs is wrong.
One of the things I used to ponder was the game Monopoly. It doesn’t reflect the real world – there is an end point where the bank runs out of money and nobody can earn any more “wages”, and you count everything up to see who has “won”. In the real world the economy doesn’t just “stop”. It would not surprise me if a significant number of people get their idea of how the economy works from Monopoly.
From time to time I’ve pondered how you could modify the playing rules to more reflect the real world where as long as you are prepared to “work” – ie, continue passing GO – you continue to receive wages, regardless of how much “money” the bank has. As a child I experimented with players being able to pay with cheques instead of “cash”.
I suppose passing GO isn’t wages but more akin to universal basic income. There needs to be a method of preventing the bank running out of “money” – it can run out of bits of paper, but it should be possible to not run out of being able to make payments to people.
We never got to that point; someone would always win first by bankrupting everyone else.
That was actually why it was invented – to show the supposed wickedness of private ownership of property, and to encourage support for a Georgist land value tax.
However the way of winning seems to turn most players into Randian cutthroat capitalists.
At school, we “privatised” the Monopoly jail, by auctioning them after someone had passed go. The owner kept the fines collected.
I think we also privatised the parking, but I can’t remember how that one worked.
We put all fines etc into the middle of the board and anyone landing on free parking scooped the stash
Monopoly “was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies”. (source WikiP)
Of course he’s wrong, because he can’t do basic arithmetic. But there is a certain amount of truth in the idea that when the Government doles out money to people, then it claws back a certain amount of it in a variety of taxes – VAT, income taxes and other things like fuel duty. The clawback can never exceed the initial outlay, and may indeed be a very small percentage once the cost of collecting it is included.
But if the government hadn’t taxed people to spend their money in the first place, the people would have had more money to spend, and their spending would have generated profits, employment and therefore tax itself.
So even your limited version only holds true if the government spending generates more tax than the private spending would have done.
A great example of the gurning moron effect is that the Covid enquiry has so far cost £200 million. Well over half of this is legal fees and the final bill is expected to be £300 million.
Despite this vast cost it has failed to spotlight that the lockdowns have been a key contributor to the erosion of the work ethic that now makes everyone poorer.
But it has driven several more stakes through the heart of the festering corpse that is BoJo’s political career, which is worth a few hundred million of any (Labour) voter’s money.
And, as can be seen from warships that can’t sail to murdered prisoners* to potholed roads to declining health measures to record levels of tax, government has been so demonstrably wasteful and unproductive that I don’t see how any reasonable person could want it to assume more responsibility.
*I don’t mourn Huntley, but the number of times he’s been attacked over the years beggars belief – his jailers have either been complicit or incompetent and neither conclusion speaks well of them.
I expect it’s hard to stop motivated prisoners from spotting their opportunities. It’s also hard to find staff at the rates they pay prison officers who are moral paragons. Plenty of stuff in the press about POs who do stuff they shouldn’t. And governors…
Huntley wore a Manchester United shirt with the number 10 on it, 10 years after he had murdered these two girls.
Whatever was done to him inside wasn’t enough…..
Does the potato know the difference between a deficit and a debt? I doubt it: his train set lacks both, due to under-funding (deficit) and no electricity supply (dept). Idiot