Post by policecar on Jan 13, 2009 11:23:21 GMT
Spendaholic Gordon Brown now needs to squander billions to get a high
Posted By: Gerald Warner at Jan 12, 2009 at 17:00:29 [General]
Another half a billion pounds this morning - not a bad figure to notch up before lunch. When it comes to spending like an uncapped fire-hydrant, Gordon Brown can see off any oil sheikh's wife flexing her husband's plastic along Brompton Road. Forget policy and politics: this is an addiction. Gordon's manic expenditure (of our money) is no longer a response to an economic downturn, it is a psychosis.
The latest ploy is £2,500 "golden hellos" to bribe employers to take on workers they do not need. Only a politician like Gordon, who has spent his life cocooned in government offices, with no experience of actual markets, could imagine this would work. Most probably he knows perfectly well it is a non-starter, but it gets him headlines and these days you have to talk in billions or the reporters will not get out of bed.
He needs to brush up on his clichés, though. This morning he said, anticipating criticism of his latest profligacy, that "the biggest cost of all would be the cost of doing nothing". Tsk, tsk! The correct phraseology is: "Doing nothing is not an option." He returned to the script, however, when he intoned that people would not lose their jobs for long "on my watch".
Gordon's gateway drug was his £20 billion squander package in late November. To get a high these days he has to spend in billions - it is months since he thought in humble millions, now small change. Already he craves the T-word and he is successfully heading towards it: while government borrowing will be a mere £120 billion this year (on present estimates), by 2013 it will be a glorious, life-affirming £1 trillion.
Gordon is assured of his place in the history books. He has single-handedly turned a serious recession, against which we would have had to batten down the hatches and work our way through, into the total meltdown of the British economy. The Tories are publishing posters of babies burdened with £17,000 of debt: they may have problems revisiting them daily to update the figure, while the printers may be too busy producing banknotes to handle less important work.
If history were still taught intelligibly in schools, people would recognise the inescapable pattern of Labour - New, Old, whatever - the unchanging agency of national bankruptcy. By 2011 Gordon plans to charge 800,000 people earning more than £150,000 a tax rate of 45 per cent. Is he wholly confident they will still be resident in Britain? Or that £150,000 will be a meaningful figure? Or that such receipts will go any distance towards paying off the mountain of debt he has incurred? No return to boom and bust, eh?
Posted By: Gerald Warner at Jan 12, 2009 at 17:00:29 [General]
Another half a billion pounds this morning - not a bad figure to notch up before lunch. When it comes to spending like an uncapped fire-hydrant, Gordon Brown can see off any oil sheikh's wife flexing her husband's plastic along Brompton Road. Forget policy and politics: this is an addiction. Gordon's manic expenditure (of our money) is no longer a response to an economic downturn, it is a psychosis.
The latest ploy is £2,500 "golden hellos" to bribe employers to take on workers they do not need. Only a politician like Gordon, who has spent his life cocooned in government offices, with no experience of actual markets, could imagine this would work. Most probably he knows perfectly well it is a non-starter, but it gets him headlines and these days you have to talk in billions or the reporters will not get out of bed.
He needs to brush up on his clichés, though. This morning he said, anticipating criticism of his latest profligacy, that "the biggest cost of all would be the cost of doing nothing". Tsk, tsk! The correct phraseology is: "Doing nothing is not an option." He returned to the script, however, when he intoned that people would not lose their jobs for long "on my watch".
Gordon's gateway drug was his £20 billion squander package in late November. To get a high these days he has to spend in billions - it is months since he thought in humble millions, now small change. Already he craves the T-word and he is successfully heading towards it: while government borrowing will be a mere £120 billion this year (on present estimates), by 2013 it will be a glorious, life-affirming £1 trillion.
Gordon is assured of his place in the history books. He has single-handedly turned a serious recession, against which we would have had to batten down the hatches and work our way through, into the total meltdown of the British economy. The Tories are publishing posters of babies burdened with £17,000 of debt: they may have problems revisiting them daily to update the figure, while the printers may be too busy producing banknotes to handle less important work.
If history were still taught intelligibly in schools, people would recognise the inescapable pattern of Labour - New, Old, whatever - the unchanging agency of national bankruptcy. By 2011 Gordon plans to charge 800,000 people earning more than £150,000 a tax rate of 45 per cent. Is he wholly confident they will still be resident in Britain? Or that £150,000 will be a meaningful figure? Or that such receipts will go any distance towards paying off the mountain of debt he has incurred? No return to boom and bust, eh?
