The Ernst
and Young are a firm of accountants, and no doubt they’re good at bean counting
and microeconomics. Unfortunately their grasp of macro is normally woeful.
A report of
theirs referred to here claims that the UK economy will not recover till
corporations start spending their cash piles.
Accountants
often do not make good business people or entrepreneurs, but you’d think the
folk at Ernst and Young would have tumbled to the fact that businesses do not
invest till they see orders pick up, or till they think orders WILL pick up.
That is, entrepreneurs with their heads screwed on do not invest just because
they happen to have cash to spare.
According to
above mentioned report on the Item Club’s ideas, “British households remain under
intense pressure”. Which is why the Item Club presumably thinks we have to rely
on businesses to suddenly start spending / investing.
And therein
lies the real solution. That is, it’s CONSUMER spending that needs to be
boosted (assuming inflation permits). And boosting consumer spending is easy:
just cut taxes on households or wage earners. The particular tax cut long
favoured by Warren Mosler is / was the payroll tax. That would do the trick.
To be more
exact, if we are going to leave the proportion of GDP allocated to private as
against public spending unchanged, then it’s household spending AND public
spending that needs boosting (again, inflation permitting). And if inflation
does not permit, then that rules out more investment spending as well, doesn’t
it?
Item Club in
check mate, I think.
"just cut taxes on households or wage earners."
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A letter I was thinking of sending to George Osborne before his first budget went along the following lines:
Dear Mr Osborne,
Perhaps you would like to make a name for yourself as Mr Ten Percent. Put all taxes down to 10% - VAT, income tax, corporation tax.
The resulting tax revenue would go down initially, but should soon recover as the economy is given a boost.
...
Well, I never sent it, and of course, he actually put VAT up to 20%. Great bit of boosting there George.
These days I favour Simon Thorpe's Flat Rate Financial Transaction Tax, or 0-0-0-0 as he talks about in various places, along with of course, money reform along lines suggested by Positive Money, NEF, et al, and gradual repayment of the National Debt by central bank printed money, along the lines suggested by Michael Rowbotham, and similar I think to your own suggestions.
Regards,
Mike Ellwood