Please stop David Cameron!!! Must read - why austerity will not pull us out of this depression!!!

http://benjaminstudebaker.com/2015/05/02/britain-for-the-love-of-god-please-stop-david-cameron/ Let me be clear–austerity reduces growth so much that it undercuts government revenue and prevents governments from shrinking their deficits. I wrote about this at the time. It was and remains shockingly clear evidence that austerity was and is failing even to reduce debt and deficits. The UK is in a significantly worse fiscal position than it was in 5 years ago. The UK performed worse than France, a country that the Wall Street Journal accused of “descending into ridiculousness”. In the first two years, Cameron’s government put up numbers that were worse than Spain’s. Spain is a basket case–even today, Spain has an unemployment rate over 20%. Had it maintained the trajectory it was on from 2009-2010, Britain could have been doing as well as Germany in 2012. What the numbers really suggest is that Britain could be much further along now if it had avoided austerity to begin with. But voters have short memories, and because the British economy has been improving since the austerity slowed down, the conservatives remain electorally competitive: To be clear, Cameron’s Conservative Party is in blue. The Labour Party is red, hard-right UKIP is in purple, the centrist liberal democrats are orange, and the hard-left greens are, obviously, green. This is disturbing, because the Conservative Party promises to continue cutting government spending by a further 2% over the next two years if it is returned to power. This would not be as fast as the rate of cutting from 2010-2012, but it would be faster than the rate from 2012-2014. This will only serve to hinder British growth further. According to Oxfam, the government’s austerity policies have devastated Britain’s middle and working classes in a variety of ways: As a result of austerity, an addition 800,000 British children will live in poverty over the next decade. Over the same period, 1.5 million working age adults will fall into poverty. By 2018, 900,000 public sector workers will have lost their jobs. The bottom 10% of British earners will have seen their incomes fall 38% over this government’s five year term. Indeed, when we adjust for inflation, British workers have seen continual reductions in their wages over the course of this parliament: In sum, this austerity serves no economic purpose–its exists because the Conservative Party wants to cut the welfare state so it can reduce taxes on the rich and for no other reason. The Labour Party has done a bad job of attacking austerity–indeed, it promises to prioritize cuts as well. There are however two key differences: Instead of cutting the deficit 2% over 2 years, Labour promises to eliminate the deficit a little bit at a time each year, which implies a cut of about 0.4% per year for five years–this is not good for the economy by any means, but it is less bad than a quick 2% cut. The composition of the cuts will be different. The conservatives promise to avoid increasing most taxes, and some they even plan to cut (including inheritance tax, which targets the wealthy and affluent). This forces the conservatives to make deeper cuts to benefits and to the welfare state to achieve their budgetary goals. Labour promises to raise taxes on the rich, which will offset cuts in other areas and facilitate a decrease in tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000. This is not by any means an ideal alternative–Labour has done little to combat the Conservative Party’s narrative that the debt poses an existential economic threat to the UK. Austerity is not an effective way to fight debt, but Labour has not challenged this claim and as a result it has become part of what ordinary British voters consider common knowledge. As a result, it has become impossible to be taken seriously in British politics if one does not promise significant spending cuts. Even the Greens are promising to focus on the debt, though their manifesto calls almost exclusively for tax increases. This is remarkable, considering that UK borrowing costs are at historic lows, indicating a high level of confidence in the UK’s solvency (and a low level of confidence in its future economic trajectory):