You can get a dictionary with definitions as well as historical origins, they are even free online 
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Iām absolutely not bothered by semantics here. There are two costs faced by every policy (i) implementation costs and (ii) opportunity costs. The implementation costs are unavoidable so are best ignored. The opportunity costs are what we vote on, e.g. we vote for a government to spend on project X and so donāt have enough money for project Y.
All of this is moot, just make sure the benefits outweigh the costs. Austerity has been a fucking shambles simply because the costs (additional debt and lost output) totally swamp any perceived benefit. Have a read on āthe paradox of thriftā.
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Yes, there is a cost in the sense that we only have so much human resource available. If we āspendā more of it on nurses, teachers, metropolitan mayors, police and crime commissioners et al then there will be less of it left to grow food, make widgets, build houses, appear on Strictly or phone us up with offers of PPI assistance. Or even mend bust hi-fi. In the end it boils down to which of these activities we want to encourage, by diverting money into them, and which we want to discourage, by taxing them closer to extinction.
VB
We havenāt had real austerity though, have we? Just some watered down version which has been neither fish nor fowl.
Tell that to the teachers being laid off or the disabled facing cuts to their DLA.
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Thanks, Iām a physicist, itās what we try to do.
VB
Yeah sorry Guy, I forgot nobody ever lost a job, got a shit deal or faced some kind of injustice under a Labour gov.
Surely you have to admit that the cuts to schools and disabled welfare are exceptional under this government?
The idea of contracting an economy in the face of a deflationary shock was discredited by the goings on in the 1920s and 1930s. Let us not forget that it took the Second World War to overcome the effects of the Great Depression. Austerity, real or otherwise, was a stupid idea that was ineffectually implemented. Even the quantitative easing (designed to inflate away the resulting accumulation of debt) was a mess, although it did accidentally avoid an asset price deflation.
idk, is this incorrect?
Given inflation, if the figures arenāt going up then it is a cut. Looks like savage cuts to Capital Investment, and there if that stays constant then you arenāt covering inflation let alone depreciation.
Dunno if Blair and Co or Maggie et al were any worse though.
Thatās the problem, its all for political show and suits the right and the left to pretend its actually happened, when its really achieved bugger all.
You canāt slash your way to prosperity in any case.
Same thing in health spending - āweāre putting in more funds than everā which means slightly more but basically flat cash which then gets overwhelmed by inflationary pressures and rising demand for care; which equals savage real term cuts.
In Nottingham (City and the county) Iām trying to help them to save c Ā£50m this year which is the difference between funding and inflationary pressure, whilst trying to minimise the impact on services and patients, which there will be. Its real difficult choice time.
āFunds investedā claims are almost always a furphy. You really need to look at the proportion of real GDP being spent on items such as health and education.
Same for schools. Iāve done a bit of benchmarking for SEN academies and while there has been an overall funding increase overall, it isnāt enough to cover the effects of NI increases from the removal of contracting out and increases in pension contribution rates for the TPS and LGPS schemes (both of which are obligatory).
Itās quite interesting to look at the pie charts here & see how spending has been allocated to different departments over the years.
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2017UKbt_17bc1n#ukgs302
One thing that is evident is the degree to which the cost of pensions has increased. I do struggle with the fact that they arenāt means tested to some degree.
They are arenāt they? Better paid people pay more NI for the same pension, or am I mistaken??
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You may be right. I donāt know if the pension is where it all goes to.
It is a myth that the NI payments that we all make go into some mythical fund to pay for our dotage. Our NI payments are paying the pensions of current pensioners. There is no fund, the money was spent elsewhere years ago.
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Personally, I have paid much, much more into NI than I will ever get back in a pension. OK NI covers a bit more like healthcare.