it’s actually been in recession for basically 16 years now but the GDP numbers are half-faked and half-misrepresentative anyway
like the only economic success stories that happen in this country anymore are American chain restaurants opening new branches (and then closing them down after 5 years bc their food is bad and too expensive) and buy-to-let landlords
in any case, this state can’t really go on for much longer like this, it’s too neoliberalised to invest in a way that would stimulate economic growth and increase the tax base, and without doing that it’ll just get further and further into debt which will eventually result in some kind of collapse in its ability to fund itself (probably going to the IMF, resulting in a genuinely catastrophic political crisis that fucks the whole thing)
america, this is what awaits you too
At this point I’m pretty sure that even if the government wanted to actually deficit spend enough to begin fixing everything, there has been such a rot and attrition over the years that it would take several decades just to fix all the shit that is broken.
yeah Kemi Badenoch didn’t mean it in the right way when she said jail 5% of them, but you’d need to go sicko mode on the civil service to start with. nothing moves quickly in this country and the public/private bureaucracy’s impotence is a big part of the problem
Sorry disabled Brits, you have to starve to death so the government can pay out on debt instruments designed to maximize “marketability” and shareholder value.
Index-linked Gilts – “differ from conventional gilts in that both the semi-annual coupon payments and the principal payment are adjusted in line with movements in the General Index of Retail Prices in the UK (also known as the RPI).”
Clap clap. The British government placed a minimum interest rate (the inflation rate) on its borrowing. Permanently imposed deflationary policy, at least for these assets.
Of that 24.3 per cent are index-linked – some £670,987 billion.
So uh, I imagine these index-linked gilts have a lower interest rate than the ones that aren’t linked.
Central to the why is the ridiculous obsession with the fiscal rules.
And all for?
Nothing of consequence.
I keep wondering how these people don’t become radicals and how they remain liberal.
How do you cover topics of your government systematically enriching the wealthy that own the country and then think the problem is some abstract obsession with fiscal rules?
A lot of MMTers, Bill Mitchell included, share the view that rich people control everything, and that the solution is to organize against them through various means. For this set of them, their fiscal analysis is a way of undoing the perception that the state is prevented by cold, hard, mathematical reality from addressing any of the issues at stake or cracking down on the bourgeois.
Of course, they’re not Leninists or anything.