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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (644023)	1/30/2012 5:07:30 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1582182

Ted the riots started in response to Duggan's death, and other police actions. Then the left tried to pin it all on fictional budget cuts.

To: tejek who wrote (644023)	2/2/2012 4:23:25 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1582182

...Some are now forecasting that Britain will slip into a recession next year. If America was expected to slide into recession next year due to insufficient demand, you’d see articles bashing Bernanke and the Fed all over the blogosphere. I’m not seeing articles bashing the Bank of England. Why not? [Yes, there weren't any articles bashing the Fed for tight money as we slid into our 2008 recession, but that was before the rise of market monetarism. They'd never again get away Scott-free. ] Perhaps it’s the stoic attitude of the British. (“Mustn’t grumble.”) But I am seeing article after article claiming that the coming recession is due to fiscal tightening. I was curious to see just how tight British fiscal policy actually is, so I checked the “Economic and Financial indicators” section at the back of a recent issue of The Economist. They list indicators for 44 countries, including virtually all of the important economies in the world. Here are the three biggest budget deficits of 2011: 1. Egypt 10% of GDP 2. Greece: 9.5% of GDP 3. Britain: 8.8% of GDP Egypt was thrown into turmoil by a revolution in early 2011. Greece is, well, we all know about Greece. And then there’s Great Britain, third biggest deficit in the world... themoneyillusion.com Krugman’s Austere Science by Don Boudreaux on January 30, 2012 in Budget Issues, Current Affairs, Debt and Deficits, Scientism, Standard of Living, Stimulus In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman blames Britain’s economic woes on the British government’s alleged policy of “austerity.” Yet he offers no evidence that Her Majesty’s government is actually pursuing such a policy. Fortunately, Scott Sumner checked some relevant facts. From data on the 44 major world economies listed in The Economist‘s “Economic and Financial indicators” section, we learn that only two governments had 2011 budget deficits larger (as a percentage of GDP) than Britain’s: Egypt and Greece. As for actual spending amounts, I logged a few minutes on the Internet to discover that British-government spending – adjusted for inflation – has risen every year since the start of the financial crisis. This spending in 2011 was 16 percent higher than it was in 2007, and is projected to be even higher in 2012. Krugman might argue that the U.K.’s budget deficit and government spending should be even higher. But he’s wrong to write as if it’s beyond doubt that the policy pursued today by the British government is indeed one of austerity. As Scott suggests in his post, that a policy of austerity is being pursued cannot legitimately be inferred from the continuation of an economic slump, for any such inference assumes the correctness of the theory (here, Keynesianism) whose validity is at issue. Krugman comes awfully close to committing this scientific gaff.http://cafehayek.com/2012/01/krugmans-austere-science.html coyoteblog.com you found your chart on a winger site I guess to you facts are facts if you don't like the source. And if you don't like the facts, you decide you don't like the source so you can ignore the facts. The charts are from a government spending statistics site, not a political site. There is no political interpretation or spin on them, they are simply the facts, and all the years up to 2011 (inclusive) are the actual stats, only 2012 on are estimates. Of course even if it was a "winger" site, your whole response would be ad-hominem. Facts don't cease being facts because they are claimed by a conservative. Osborne confirmed he had ordered 83 billion pounds ($130 billion) in spending cuts through 2015 "Cuts" that are reductions in the planned increase. The reality is that there isn't just a nominal increase, there is a real increase. Spending is going up faster than inflation, or even inflation and population growth combined. Its just not exploding upwards quite as fast as was planned back before the UK started to have one of the world's worst budget deficit problems.