What "austerity measures" do you think are "too severe"? What impact do those measures have on the economy as a whole?

I think there are a few reasons why they sit on their hands and watch from afar whilst collecting what is by most measures an impressive salary and even more impressive expenses and retirement package for a five year contract...

1. If they have an alternative plan then they don't have a "personality" to present it for them, there is no-one in their team with half an ounce of gravitas to make it sound like he knows that his solution is the best - LibDems had one in opposition in Vince Cable, everyone wanted to interview him in opposition but he's been shown to be a sham mouthpiece quoting only theories since being shuffled sideways into a job with no real purpose.

2. They don't have an alternative plan that much is clear, their strategy is to wait for five years, draw the salary and then walk back into power on the back of a disastrous Tory/LibDem term which even a five year old child could shoot down at the election televised debates.

3. There is no plan anywhere in the world that could offer a quick solution, there are people who claim that there is but those people are simply quoting theories, truth is that the whole world economic cycle has been shown and proved to be an impossible dream driven by con-men, shysters, gamblers, smoke and mirrors and some of Sooties magic dust, even last week we saw that the "experts" do not have a clue what is happening when statements were made of GDP figures showing the UK slipping into another recession when in fact they were several points better than the "experts" thought they would be - those self same "experts" would have gambled your pension scheme on their "predictions" last week based on their "expert" knowledge.

What relevence does this have to me highlighting your incorrect interpretation of statistics?

That's the simplistic take on it that the coalition have been pushing all along.
If it were as simple as that no-one would take out a mortgage and no business would borrow to upgrade machinery.
I have seen MPs freely interchanging the terms deficit and debt as though they are the same thing ... which makes one wonder, do they actually know the difference between deficit, structural deficit and debt, and if they do, why are they using one term to mean the other?

Of course, if you have a deficit, then you want to eliminate it at some point, especially if it's structural.
Is a recession the time to do it?
In some ways partly yes, and others no.
If one's family finances are broke, you'd stop buying luxuries but you wouldn't stop buying your travel season ticket that gets you to work.
In a national economy you also have the economy itself to think about ... i.e. GDP ... if you sack loads of people, it costs you in benefit payments and also has a knock-on effect in that other people lose their jobs too, not just the ones you sacked.
That spirals down and down.

And the spin works. People can understand the concept of a maxed out credit card but don't understand how inflation affects debt and what the ability to print money can have on how you manage an economy. In other words the spin is deliberately misleading yet people fall for it.

This government has taken this kind of spin to a new level and my favorite has always been "Why should the postman pay tax towards the students fees?" which implied two things. 1. The postman was paying a significant amount of their taxes that was put toward to block grant. 2. If the block grant was abolished the postman would consequently save a shed load on their taxes.

Neither is true. Due to the progressive nature of taxation if you work out the %'s a postman on a basic postmans salary paid less than £30 [ia year[/i towards the block grant and their income tax didn't change anyway. They are no better off as a result.

What I don't get is what someone else mentioned is that when it's easy to see such obvious things like this is why Labour don't [udirectly challenge the spin[/u. In this example they don't even have to say they are opposed to tuition fee increases (though I wish they would) but to simply point out forcefully that the way the change was being sold was deliberately misleading and deliberately divisive. They would then be able to question the motive for the change. Is it really austerity or the privatisation of higher education?

It's very frustrating the government is being given such an easy ride.

Indeed, I don't know why they don't.
One of Blair's pre-election successes was the so-called "Rebuttal Unit", set up at Millbank to knock-back Conservative accusations of uncosted spending and to challenge/disprove fuzzy promises/predictions/claims of success from the Conservatives.
If set up again, once the press knew of it they'd be phoning it all the time.

Austerity measures mean that over 25% of the working population in Spain is on the dole.

What is the economy of Spain spending on them and their families to stop them from starving?

What is the economy of Spain earning from this 25% of what [icould[/i be productive workers?

What is the economy of Spain earning extra from sales tax etc by reason of these people having a hugely reduced disposable income?

As businesses wither and die for lack of customers with money, what is the economy of Spain earning as this infrastructure collapses in a heap?

But is not all that a direct result of a nation previously living above its productive means? EU subsidiay, piggy backing on Germany's strong currency, artificially high wages, cheap credit, property bubble. Isn't this just the awful reality of all those "good" years coming home to roost? All this talk of a choice between "austerity" and "growth" is utter nonsense.

The so called "growth" strategy of paying people artificially high wages (often to do artificial jobs) and providing them with easy spending power is what lead to the financial crisis. It has been tried and failed on a monumental scale.

People's thinking needs to move beyond the inane and think of how to tackle the reality. That's one of the reasons why Labour will lose the next election - they have no strategy for the UK that will stand up to the public's scrutiny.

And that's where it all falls down. The public, such as they are, are more interested in who the douche from One Direction is shagging at the moment and doesn't Kate look great now she's pregnant etc, than the realities of sorting out the mess the banks left us with. The public's scrutiny will be like the blind leading the blind (if there was any scrutiny worth the name now, Gideon's plans would be toast).

I'm sorry Dally but I've run out of patience with your (probably deliberate) missing of the point.

Apart from a bit about it raining on polling day and Emmerdale and Corry are on so not even bothering to cast a vote anyway, that is pretty spot on.

No.


Great. When will you start?

So, you must be arguing that Spain's "growing" economy was sustainable in its previous form. If that was the case why the austerity now, why isn't it still powering ahead and recruiting unemployed people from other EU member states?

It was sustainable pre-crash. GDP was growing slowly but steadily. Unemployment was falling slowly but steadily. Govt debt to GDP was falling significantly. Then the crash hit and the inability to print money and devalue their currency combined with falling domestic demand due to the crash and austerity measures has led to the current problem.

So there property prices were sustainable? This crash of which you speak is not something divorced from the "real" economy. It occurred because the real economy of the "Western" world was a basket case.

Spain and to a lesser extent, Portugal, embarked on a massive construction programme. Most of this construction was apartment and villa developments and strangely enough was funded by Irish banks or funded by Spanish banks on behalf of Irish investors. When the Irish economy (especially the banks) tanked, it led to an emergency stop on the Spanish property market. Couple this with a typical southern European method of conduting business, where 75% of any deal is legitimately declared and 25% is "black money" - i.e. paid in cash. There's no wonder the Spanish economy is in a dire position.

What boils my pi[is[/is is when I hear Osborne and other right-wing fukwits telling us we need to keep on the path of austerity because we don't want to end up like Greece, Portugal or Spain. There is absolutely zero chance of us following them into the catastrophic state they currently experience.

We desperately need to embark on a massive building programme, not to flog off to speculators, in the hope of a quick buck but to house our own population at a reasonable cost. This situation is not too dissimilar to the one we found ourselves in at the end of WW2 and as a nation, we were more skint then than we are now. I have previously given an example of how this could be achieved through issuing government bonds. The only thing preventing it is an ideological aversion to non-private renting.

Except it wasn't. The vast majority of the "real" economy of the Western world was perfectly fine. 1 part of it was not due to the greed/incompetence/short-sightedness/short-termist culture that had developed in the financial sector.
Everyone knows something was wrong to cause the crash, that's not the issue being discussed. You were inferring that the Spanish economy was unsustainable pre crash, it wasn't. It was perfectly sustainable. As in most countries, the reduction in demand post crash is the main reason why the economy has contracted. That reduction in demand has been exacerbated by austerity measures and the Euro. In Britain we're lucky to have the BoE to print money and lower interest rates to try and stimulate demand. Sadly the government has been undermining that with contractionary measures.
In Spain they don't have the option to print money and lower interest rates, so the austerity measures have an even more deleterious effect. Spain was in a weaker position to us, no doubt, but had they still retained monetary control and pursued an expansionary fiscal route instead, they would not be in the current horrible position they are.
Of course if we didnt have a government determined to pursue ideology and stopped contradictory fiscal & monetary policies by increasing government spending to fill the demand gap then we would be a lot better off too.

The financial sector does not operate in isolation! The apparent boom in economies was primarily (if not wholly) down to cheap money creating asset price bubbles. The construction of which you speak was the most tangible and obvious example. Eire is the extreme case of its effects - a booming "tiger" economy built on building. I spent half a day in Dublin a couple of years before the collapse and they were all buzzing. When I pointed out the obvious - that there was no need for all these buildings and it would end in tears they didn't seem to see that. In short, the real economy was not in good shape or else all those secured loans could be serviced and the banks would not be shakey now. Your naivety and head-burying is staggering.

Must I? How do you work that out, then? You asked:
" =#0000FFis not all that a direct result of a nation previously living above its productive means?"
..to which I replied "No." I.e, no, it is not a direct result of a nation previously living above its productive means.

I did not refer to "Spain's growing economy", I did not mention its sustainability or otherwise, and so as per you are commenting from the wrong orifice.

The economic "boom", as you inaccurately put it, was not wholly or even primarily down to asset price bubbles, and that bubble wasn't solely due to increased money supply.
I didn't speak about any construction, you're confusing me with someone else, in much the same way as you are confusing financial gambling/greed/short-termism in the financial sector as representative of an entire economy.
You spent half a day in Dublin looking at buildings and so worked out the Irish economy would fail? Did you walk back across the Irish Sea too?

That was pretty much exactly what happened in Portugal, particularly on The Algarve, I have a friend who operated as an architect designing two, sometimes three huge multi-million euro villas per year on the most expensive strips of land on The Algarve since around 2000, he's pulled back from that business now as the market is completely dead but up to 2008 or so his clientele were 100% British and Irish clients, particularly Irish, and some very famous names too.

I was out there with him last June socialising with one of his Portuguese main contractors and he was speaking of which millionaire pad was up for sale, which one was slashed to half its price (you never see for sale signs on the streets but they are being handled by sales agents), and the fear that the new money being invested on The Algarve now was Russian and former Russian states, the Portuguese don't like the situation, they have traded with the British and Irish for as long as there has been an Algarve and they just don't trust the Russian money but they have very little choice.

There is a new project emerging for my mate later this year and so he's spending more time out there again, I'll be partaking in a little "business trip" of my own in a few weeks time, four days of "research" for paintings which is chargeable on the "other job" business account of course

Really? The financial crisis was caused by 'artificially high wages'? Unless you're talking about the 'artificially high wages' received by the greedy, irresponsible s who made a fortune gambling on sub-prime debt, I must respectfully suggest that you're talking crap.

No, but I walked back.

"It will fail" is Dally's default setting.

Credit where it's due (pun unintended) ... knee-jerk as his judgement was, at least it was better than Osborne's pronouncements that the Irish economy was an example to us all, a shining beacon that we should be praising and following.