Saturday, July 10, 2010

Britain is not a passively accepting country

.
Still obsessing over the direction we are heading in economically - looks like we're heading for a perfect storm in a couple of years' time! I intend to periodically track our progress or otherwise to economic Armageddon. First up, this quote I spotted the other day from Prof Greg Philo:



"The slash and burn economics which we are now being offered will depress economic growth, since much of the stimulus for private enterprise comes from public spending. The public is likely to reject the cuts because they believe our problems result from the misdeeds of a wealthy minority. There is no political capital in asking the bottom half of the population which has only nine per cent of the wealth to pick up the bill through lost jobs and regressive taxation. Britain is not a passively accepting country; when in the past government policies have been seen as profoundly unjust, they have provoked social agitation. If this happens, the markets will be depressed even more and we move further down the economic spiral that the coalition with little mandate and less economic sense is now producing.

The UK has £5,500 billion of private wealth agglomerated in the top 20 per cent of the population, much of it in inflated property values making it effectively dead money. A far better way of tackling the deficit would be a radical tax on property, which would re-cycle some of this wealth back into the productive sector via government spending" - Prof Greg Philo, Glasow University Media Group, in the Evening Standard 6 July 2010(not on their website)

No comments: