Is Britain stuffed? Report on economy

[Mike]

http://www.tullettprebon.com/Documen...Report_007.pdf

[Smell the Coffee FFS]

Wow that is shocking!

[LogicAndFairness]

The mulitiracialism and low White birth rate mean that civilisation itself will collapse here. The balance has tipped from people who want to cooperate as they feel bound to one another, to people who are in individual competition and only want to do what immediately benefits themselves while regarding others with cynicism.

[LogicAndFairness]

Previous research has shown that students who take economics classes are more likely to describe greed as good. Pairing ethics courses with economics may be beneficial, Piff said.

“It might be as simple as not only stressing individual performance, but the value of cooperation and improving the welfare of others,” he said. “That goes a long way.”
In the research reported yesterday, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...hers-find.html
An attitude nurtured by genetic diversity in a population.

[Endangered]

"Britain’s fiscal and economic problems
result from grotesque mishandling
of the economy under the 1997-
2010 Labour administration. Gordon
Brown’s reform of the financial
regulatory system, and his insistence
that the Bank of England determine
monetary policy on the basis of retail
inflation alone, resulted in a reckless
escalation in mortgage lending.
The ensuing property price boom
spurred unsustainable growth in a
plethora of housing-related sectors,
and underwrote a rapid expansion
in consumer borrowing. Believing
that this bubble was real growth,
Brown spent up to, and beyond, the
apparent expansion in the tax base
that had resulted from the propertydriven
boom. Real public spending
increased by 53% in a period in which
the economy expanded by just 17%.
As soon as the bubble burst, a chasm
rapidly opened up between excessive
spending and falling tax revenues.
In addition to skewing the economy
towards debt and public spending,
Brown and his colleagues imposed
ever-increasing regulatory and
fiscal burdens on business, and
simultaneously transferred resources
from private industry into a public
sector whose productivity was subject
to continuous decline. This weakened
the overall productivity of the
British economy.

Labour’s period in office was
characterised not just by economic
and fiscal mismanagement but also
by the promotion of a culture of moral
absolutism centred around spurious
and selective concepts of ‘fairness’.
This culture, and the accompanying
sense of individual and collective
entitlement, is the biggest obstacle in
the way of effective economic reform."

[Mike]

"Britain’s fiscal and economic problems
result from grotesque mishandling
of the economy under the 1997-
2010 Labour administration. Gordon
Brown’s reform of the financial
regulatory system, and his insistence
that the Bank of England determine
monetary policy on the basis of retail
inflation alone, resulted in a reckless
escalation in mortgage lending.
The ensuing property price boom
spurred unsustainable growth in a
plethora of housing-related sectors,
and underwrote a rapid expansion
in consumer borrowing. Believing
that this bubble was real growth,
Brown spent up to, and beyond, the
apparent expansion in the tax base
that had resulted from the propertydriven
boom. Real public spending
increased by 53% in a period in which
the economy expanded by just 17%.
As soon as the bubble burst, a chasm
rapidly opened up between excessive
spending and falling tax revenues.
In addition to skewing the economy
towards debt and public spending,
Brown and his colleagues imposed
ever-increasing regulatory and
fiscal burdens on business, and
simultaneously transferred resources
from private industry into a public
sector whose productivity was subject
to continuous decline. This weakened
the overall productivity of the
British economy.

Labour’s period in office was
characterised not just by economic
and fiscal mismanagement but also
by the promotion of a culture of moral
absolutism centred around spurious
and selective concepts of ‘fairness’.
This culture, and the accompanying
sense of individual and collective
entitlement, is the biggest obstacle in
the way of effective economic reform."

Beat me to it quoting that section!

[Mike]

The mulitiracialism and low White birth rate mean that civilisation itself will collapse here. The balance has tipped from people who want to cooperate as they feel bound to one another, to people who are in individual competition and only want to do what immediately benefits themselves while regarding others with cynicism.

Short-termism prevails for individuals and government. It's like the party at the end of Downfall.

[Endangered]

Just been doing a little browsing on the author of the original pdf, Dr Tim Morgan, and found this from 2010:

http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/2...by-tim-morgan/

According to conventional analysis, Britain now has
its first coalition administration since 1945, but,
in one sense at least, all political parties, and
hence all governments, are coalitions. This is
certainly true of Labour. The party was founded
as the political wing of a labour movement of which
the trades unions were the industrial wing, and of
which the objective was the betterment of the living
conditions of what was then an identifiable and
largely homogenous working class.

But, as social change has altered the economic
dynamic of the UK, so this relatively straightforward
value-set has been complicated almost out of
recognition – for a start, who exactly are today’s
‘British working class’?

Along the way, Labour’s original core has attracted
a constellation of interest groups, to some of whom
(such as pacifists, and the various libertarian
groupings), many of the policies of Blair and Brown
were anathema.

The leadership contest has illustrated some at least
of the tensions within the left coalition led by
Labour. Some luminaries have insisted that the party
must adhere to the ‘New Labour agenda’ (popularly
associated with Blair and Peter Mandelson), while
others counter that Labour should, instead, renew
its connection with its core support base.

Though I think that Labour needs to develop a wholly
new philosophy, advocates of the ‘core support’ view
have a good point, whereas the New Labour philosophy
is a proven failure and is dead in the water. The
greatest single criticism of the New Labour
administration lies in the extent to which it
betrayed and alienated natural Labour supporters by
turning its back on the party’s history, principles
and objectives.

I'm fairly sure that labour will romp home next GE but I don't think Milliband will follow a single word of Morgan's advice. They will continue with the 'new labour' agenda.

Amongst these failings, arguably the most serious
was an excessive devotion to unfettered free
markets. When Labour stalwarts complained that
Tony Blair and his team were ‘more Tory than the
Conservatives’, they were bang on target. Far
from reversing two of the key trends of the
Thatcher era – deregulation and privatisation –
New Labour accelerated both. The guiding philosophy
was that the financial services industries,
liberated to prosper, would pay for a new welfare
state. It was a disastrous miscalculation, in
that it failed to understand the ultimately
destructive, bubble-building nature of unfettered
market liberalism.

[Mike]

The high price of moral absolutism

If the Labour administration failed
on two of its stated aims – economic
competence and ethical foreign
relations – then it succeeded, rather
horrifically, on the third, which was to
change ‘hearts and minds’.
Perhaps the most intractable part
of Britain’s economic problem is the
mind-set engendered by Labour.
This mind-set, which is a compound
of entitlement (both personal and
national), financial irresponsibility and
spurious moral absolutism, makes it
difficult for the public to perceive the
nature of the national problem, let
alone resolve it.
Not since the days of William
Gladstone has a government come
to power with a greater sense of moral
fervour, and it is at least arguable that
Tony Blair and (in particular) Gordon
Brown were even more prone than ‘the
Grand Old Man’ to treat the despatch
box as a pulpit. The essential difference
between Gladstone and New Labour,
however, was that Blair and Brown
peddled an essentially secular moral
absolutism, albeit with at times a
distinctly nonconformist flavour.
A selective concept of ‘fairness’ was
at the very heart of Labour’s secular
theology, so much so that an entire
chapter of the 2009 budget was
entitled “helping people fairly” (when
helping them effectively might have
been a much better idea).
The problem with this was (and is)
that ‘fairness’ is an extraordinarily
vague concept, one to which everyone
can subscribe and then interpret as
suits them best. For example, a rich
person might argue that fairness
involves every working person paying
the same amount of tax, or at any rate
paying the same percentage of his or
her income, whilst a person on a low
income might believe that the system
should take far more from the better
off. The reality is that, beyond basic
rights as outlined in documents as
varied as the American Constitution
and the European Convention on
Human Rights, there are very few
moral absolutes in a secular society.
Labour’s solution simply was to
declare ‘ex-cathedra’ principles and to
demonise those who had the temerity
to disagree.
Even by its own standards, Labour’s
secular morality was full of holes.
Where, critics asked, was the ‘fairness’
in plundering private pension
schemes, piling gigantic debts onto
future generations, or invading
Iraq? Where was the ‘fairness’
in imposing rigid uniformity on
everyone, banning minority activities
(such as fox-hunting), leaving the
income tax threshold a long way
below the minimum wage, enforcing
multiculturalism as a secular religion
which no-one was allowed even to
question on pain of arrest, or granting
national and local government ever
greater coercive and surveillance
powers over individuals?
Labour’s creed of moral absolutism
had multiple negative spin-offs. But
from a purely economic perspective,
Labour pursued disastrous policies
(such as ‘light touch’ deregulation) to
the point of recklessness because it
believed that it had the moral inside track
on all issues.

[Endangered]

The U.K. Is Not O.K.

Britain's 'austerity drive' really has been nothing of the
sort when you look at the numbers (which we shall do
in a moment), but somehow, in a brilliant piece of
marketing, the coalition government have managed to
talk tough whilst simultaneously bringing the UK’s
Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR) to a little
over 60% ABOVE where it was when they took office
in May 2010.