Tag Archives: austerity

I’ve just written a ‘top 10’ overview of the recent Alberta budget. Points raised in the post include the following: -The budget lays out a four-year strategy of spending cuts, letting population growth and inflation do much of the heavy lifting. -After one accounts for both population growth and inflation, annual provincial spending in Alberta by 2022 is projected to be 16.2% lower than it was last year. -Alberta remains Canada’s lowest-taxed province. It also...

Thirty pieces of silver As they discuss the new candidate for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it seems that the lead candidate for Lagarde's position is the former Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a pro-austerity member of the Labor Party (which I guess is at least nominally on the left), it is worth reading the new CEPR report on the possible effects of IMF programs in Latin America, more specifically the one in Ecuador, now that the country has been brought back...

On July 26, 2018, UK Guardian columnist Phillip Inman published an article – Household debt in UK ‘worse than at any time on record’ – which reported on the latest figures at the time from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). He noted that the data showed that “British households spent around £900 more on average than they received in income during 2017, pushing their finances into deficit for the first time since the credit boom of the 1980s … The figures pose a challenge to the...

It's been pretty quiet in Lafferland since the Brexit referendum. All the talk has been of trade and sovereignty, not deregulation and tax cuts. But there's nothing quite like a Tory leadership election to bring supply-siders out of hibernation. So here is Sajid Javid singing an old sweet song to attract the votes of Tory party members: Cutting tax rates could bring in billions of extra revenue, which would mean: More nurses ?‍⚕️?‍⚕️ More teachers ?‍??‍? More police ?‍♂️?‍♀️"I would cut...

On Sunday, May 12, 2019, I will be presenting a workshop in London on – Local Government Funding: Challenging the Status Quo. Basically, I will be speaking about the way in which flawed understandings of the capacities of currency-issuing governments, combined with a vicious, ideological attack on working people from a government fully invested in neoliberal transfers to the elites, have ravaged the capacity of local government in the UK to deliver essential public services. See the Events...

Lars Syll schools Douglas Carr (The Hill op-ed) on austerity and the Swedish economy. Lars P. Syll’s BlogSweden as a case of MMTLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

So André Lara-Resende, who I discussed here before, is again writing on the crisis of macroeconomics (in Portuguese and you might need to have a subscription), and now instead of embracing the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL), has supposedly embraced Modern Money Theory (MMT). Many US MMTers cheered this as a demonstration of the reach of MMT in other countries. I would be less cheerful.Lara-Resende, let me explain to non-Brazilian readers, was a student of Lance Taylor at MIT, and...

On Saturday, I watched Ken Loach's 2016 film "I, Daniel Blake" for the first time. The following evening, I watched the second episode in the BBC's adaptation of Victor Hugo's 19th century novel "Les Misérables". And here is my unpopular opinion. I think that as a parable of the U.K. today, particularly the difficulties experienced by single parents, "Les Misérables" beats "I, Daniel Blake" hands down. Why? Because Fantine's story is closer to the experience of single mothers today. True,...

Balance sheet approach to economic analysis and its social political implications. How neoliberalism, controlled by finance capital, rules in the EZ owing to its self-imposed constraints and intransigence of finance capital to accommodate.People's DemocracyThe Yellow Vest MovementPrabhat Patnaik | Indian Marxist economist and political commentator, retired from the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi...

I haven't written a post for a while. I wanted everyone to read the post I wrote in November about my niece Annie's suicide. Writing new posts drops older ones down the list, and I didn't want her memorial post to disappear off the radar until after her funeral. Annie's funeral was last Tuesday, 18th December, the day after her 29th birthday. Now, it is time to write again.But not yet to move on from the issues that Annie's death highlights. This post is about the link between mental ill...