Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

You don't solve problems by just pumping in more and more money. Rob the rich to pay the poor and the immigrants - what a great idea Ed ! Did Ed say anything about immigration?

Yes he did, Doods. He said he's got Tanker's address, and he's moving a family of 500 Romanians into the flat opposite as soon as he can get a lorry to smuggle them into the country.

DB<

It depends where it is pumped.

Into irrigation or down a bottomless pit!

Or £600,000 London properties for the "family".

Take your pit.

Hilary - lol !

doodlebug4 - 23 Sep 2014 17:32 - 46261 of 46264

You don't solve problems by just pumping in more and more money.......ends.....

I agree entirely, the Tories with QE, Help To Buy, and low interest rates have fudged up a recovery on quick sand.

Its about time someone else other than I and Fred pointed this out.

Well said doodles.

We have our usual three Monday polls today: 22/9/2014

The weekly Lord Ashcroft poll has topline figures of CON 27%(-6), CON 33%(nc), LDEM 9%(nc), UKIP 17%(+3), GRN 6%(nc). The drop in Conservative support looks striking.

The twice-weekly Populus poll meanwhile has topline figures of CON 33%, LAB 37%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 12%.

Finally the daily YouGov poll for the Sun tonight has toplines of CON 33%, LAB 35%, LD 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5%.

Sky news gave Ed's ramblings a hard time. They said the figures didn't add up and didn't expect him to provide any details on most of the topics.

Nothing said about immigration, hardly surprising since it was a Labour Government which decided to open the flood gates.

errrrrr do your research, Maggie in fact opened the gates and left them open during the Big Bang.

Labour has said sorry about it. There are leaked Labour emails discussing increasing immigrants to change the demographics of the UK to get them elected more often. Mandelson admitted going round Europe looking for people to come here.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2014

Given his appalling track record of failure, why do so many people trust George Osborne on the economy?



George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer has been a remarkable display of incompetence. Anyone who tries to deny this is clearly extremely confused about economics, or they're blatantly lying to you.

The easiest way to prove that Osbornomics has failed in its own terms is to look at the economic projections George Osborne made when he first took office in 2010. He bragged about how he was going to completely eradicate the budget deficit by 2015, and how he was going to protect the UK's AAA credit ratings. He has blatantly failed to achieve either of these things. It has long since been accepted that there is absolutely no chance that the budget deficit will be eradicated by 2015, and in 2013 the UK suffered the embarrassment of being stripped of it's AAA ratings by the credit rating agencies for the first time since the 1970s.

The extraordinary scale of Osborne's borrowing is so bad that by the end of the 2010-15 parliament he will have borrowed £207 billion more than he claimed that he would. Under his stewardship public debt will have risen by 50% in just five years, meaning he will have increased the national debt by more than every single Labour government in history combined!

Not only has George Osborne completely failed to eradicate the budget deficit as he claimed he would, and borrowed hundreds of billions more than he claimed he would, the economy is way smaller than he claimed it was going to be back in 2010. Osborne's 2010 projections claimed that by the end of the 2010-15 parliament the nominal GDP of the UK economy would be £1,916 billion, however this has now been revised downwards to £1,788 billion. It turns out that George Osborne has borrowed £207 billion more than he said he would in order to make the economy £128 billion smaller than he claimed it was going to be!
If anyone in the real world would have missed their business projections by such appallingly vast margins, there is absolutely no way they would still be in a job. However with George Osborne the situation is even more ludicrous than the fact that he's still in his job despite his ridiculous track record of failure, because the public actually believe the right-wing propaganda about how much of a success he's been and rate the Tories as by far the most economically trustworthy party!

That Osbornomics has been such an appalling failure in its own terms, yet the public laud the Tories for their economic competence raises the interesting question of how it is possible for the public to be so completely wrong.

Economic fairy stories

The first thing to note is that a huge percentage of the public have no training in the economic basics, meaning that they are susceptible to the most ludicrous economic fairy stories.

One such example of a ludicrous economic fairy story is the endlessly repeated "recovery" narrative. The fact that the UK economy has only just recovered to pre-crisis levels in 2014 means that the entire UK economy has suffered an average economic growth rate of 0% for seven long years. The Tories and the right-wing press would have us believe that we're experiencing a remarkable economic recovery, but in reality we've just endured the slowest economic recovery since the aftermath of the 1720 South Sea Bubble!

Not only has the economy effectively flatlined for seven years, the majority of people have become poorer due to wage repression, cuts in in-work benefits, hidden inflation and the ideological assault on public services. The economy is the same size as it was before the economic crisis, but the majority of people are much worse off now because of the massive transference of wealth from the majority to the wealthy minority that has been going on under George Osborne's watch.

Another example of how people can be bufuddled by economic fairy stories is the way that so many people believe the economically naive idea that the only way to reduce the debt is to reduce government spending. In reality it is possible to dramatically cut spending and massively increase the debt (as George Osborne has spent the last four years demonstrating) and it is also possible to reduce the debt by increasing spending (as was proven by the post-war Labour government, which spent huge amounts on founding the NHS, building hundreds of thousands of council houses and rebuilding Britian's shattered infrastructure, and managed to reduce the national debt by 40% of GDP in the process).

The paradox of thrift has been known about since antiquity, yet still people prefer to think in really simplistic terms, rather than accept the complex reality that cutting spending on economically beneficial things can increase the debt, and increasing spending on economically beneficial things can reduce the debt.

It seems counter-intuitive, but cutting spending can increase the debt and increasing spending can reduce the debt. Most people simply won't accept this fact because they know absolutely nothing about basic macroeconomic ideas like fiscal multiplication and the marginal propensity to consume.

Another economic fairy story that is adored by the public is the idea that Labour blasts loads of money, and the Tories pay off the debts. George Osborne himself used this one back in 2007 when he said "As has been the case so many times before, it's the next Conservative government that will have to clean up the mess left by a profligate and irresponsible Labour Party". Millions of people believe that this is what has been going on, despite the fact that George Osborne has created more debt in just four years than every Labour government in history combined!

The mainstream media

The mainstream media has a lot to answer for giving George Osborne such an easy ride on his appalling track record of failure.

The right-wing press are notoriously biased towards the Tory party, meaning that he always gets an easy ride from them, no matter how often he has to revise his growth figures downwards and his borrowing figures upwards. However even traditionally left-wing publications like the Guardian are guilty of giving George Osborne a ridiculously easy ride too.

In this article entitled "George Osborne likely to miss deficit reduction target as UK borrowing rises" the Guardian discusses the fact that Obsorne looks set to miss his March 2014 projections by £10 billion, meaning that borrowing in 2014-15 will be £105 billion rather than the projected £95 billion. The fact that in 2010 George Osborne and the OBR projected that the budget deficit would be completely eliminated by 2015 wasn't even mentioned in the article.

Judging George Osborne by his most recent set of economic projections, rather than the promises he made when he became Chancellor in 2010 makes it look like he's going to be just 10% out on his calculations (borrowing £10 billion more than he claimed he would in March 2014), rather than 100% out (borrowing £105 billion more than he said he claimed he would in November 2010) .

The habit of judging Osborne against his most recent set of economic predictions instead of what he promised when he came to power has allowed him to consistently revise his economic growth projections downwards and downwards and his borrowing projections upwards and upwards without anyone pointing out how spectacularly inaccurate his original projections have proven to be.

Conclusion

If we look at the unimaginably vast differences between what George Osborne promised his austerity agenda would achieve in 2010 and what has actually happened in reality, it is impossible to conclude that Osbornomics has been anything but a catastrophic failure.

In other articles I have explained why Osbornomics has failed, but in this one I've concentrated on how the public have come to believe that George Osborne and the Tories are economically trustworthy, despite the absolute mountain of evidence of their catastrophic economic mismanagement.

In my view there are many reasons including the widespread economic illiteracy of general the public (due to the appalling lack of economic literacy training in state schools), the incredibly biased reporting of the mainstream media and the absolutely ridiculous "austerity -lite" stance of the Labour party.

Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy to change the social make-up of the UK, secret papers suggest.

A draft report from the Cabinet Office shows that ministers wanted to ‘maximise the contribution’ of migrants to their ‘social objectives’.

The number of foreigners allowed in the UK increased by as much as 50 per cent in the wake of the report, written in 2000.

Labour has always justified immigration on economic grounds and denied it was using it to foster multiculturalism.

But suspicions of a secret agenda rose when Andrew Neather, a former government adviser and speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said the aim of Labour’s immigration strategy was to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Mr Neather said he helped to write the 2000 report which outlined a strategy to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’.

It had already emerged that the Cabinet Office report was censored to remove details of possible links between immigration and organised crime, street fights and begging.

One of the sections missing from the final report said: ‘There is emerging evidence that the circumstances in which asylum seekers are living is leading to criminal offences, including fights and begging.’

A second section warned: ‘Migration has opened up new opportunities for organised crime.’

Hays Maggie opened the gates for immigrants, she wanted Bankers to create the Worlds biggest Banking Sector in the World and she got it.

What she forgot to do was to close the gates behind them when they were all here.......THE BIG BANG or had you conveniently forgotten.

What have the borrowings been used for?

From: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/514045/Ukip-scrap-inheritance-tax

EXCLUSIVE: No more inheritance tax pledge Ukip

NIGEL Farage’s UK Independence Party is to call for the complete abolition of inheritance tax, the Daily Express has learned.

By: Macer HallPublished: Tue, September 23, 2014

Nigel Farage Nigel Farage throws down gauntlet to rival parties with election promise [GETTY]

The anti-Brussels party is to include a pledge to scrap the 40% death duty on estates in its manifesto for next year’s general election.

Ukip insiders say the annual tax grab from bereaved families, worth around £3.5billion to the Treasury this year, is fundamentally unjust and needs to be got rid of as a matter of principle.

A commitment to sweeping away the hated levy will be a flagship measure in a radical tax-cutting programme that Mr Farage’s “People’s Army” will put to voters in their battle to make a major breakthrough at Westminster.

The bold new policy is to be unveiled at Ukip’s annual conference in Doncaster on Friday.

It follows the Daily Express’s popular crusade against inheritance tax that has won the backing of hundreds of thousands of readers.

Patrick O’Flynn, a Ukip MEP and party spokesman on economics, will tell the conference: “Doctrinaire socialists look at the death tax from the wrong end of the telescope.

“Instead of being envious of those who have inherited, our primary response should be to be respectful of those who earned the money, paid tax on it, invested it wisely and wish to pass it on to their chosen heirs.

“Of course, those heirs are fortunate but envy at their good fortune should never be used as a justification for depriving property owners of the right to pass on the wealth they have created.

Under current Treasury thresholds, inheritance tax is levied on estates valued at £325,000 for an individual and £650,000 for a married couple.

Alarm has been growing about the number of middle-income families being dragged into the death tax net as a result of rising property prices.

The number of estates paying the levy is set to quadruple from just 2.6 per cent of those dying in 2009-10 to 10 per cent by the end of the decade, according to the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Figures released last month by the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast annual Treasury receipts from inheritance tax (IHT) are set to rise from £3.5billion in 2013-14 to £5.8billion in 2018-19.

Another recent study showed that Britain and Ireland have the highest levels of inheritance tax in the world.

Ukip officials insist that major cuts could be made to public spending that would leave the Treasury new funds to significantly reduce the tax burden including scrapping death duty.

They party believes £10billion could be saved by ending Britain’s annual net contribution to the EU. It also wants to drastically cut Britain’s spending on foreign aid from the current £11billion a year to around £2billion.

Ukip is also calling for the abolition of the so-called “Barnett Formula” for allocating resources to the four nations of the UK following last week’s referendum vote in Scotland against independence.

The present system of grants from Whitehall means that around £1,600 extra per head of population is spent each year in Scotland compared to England.

Max see Freds post 46517 and the debate that followed.

Here we are from WIKI Thatcher opening the gate for immigrants. , Thatcher said one thing and then allowed another thing to happen...............sounds a bit like camoron.

Thatcher’s legacy on immigration can also be read into her reform of the UK economy. There was arguably a paradox between her Government’s anti-immigration rhetoric and their wider policy programme of full-blown capitalism and labour deregulation, which took the British economy to a new phase of globalisation. The full development of Mrs Thatcher’s vision of the UK as a service economy, offering high rent incomes to the elite and large numbers of low paid jobs to the masses, had the effect of mobilising new types of economic migration. It also brought to the forefront all the issues of labour exploitation among many low-paid workers including many migrants - this can be at least partly explained as the consequence of Thatcherite neo-liberal policies.

EL. Do you have a link for that story?


gf. Will do.

Gf, you really are struggling when you keep blaming the Thatcher era for everything. How long is it since she was PM? I know time flies when you start getting older.

Thats strange doodles you were agreeing in post 46265 with mine and Freds stance. Your all over the place.

Not much consistency shown.