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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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You're right that Tories are a failure on their own terms, and because of that the idea that the neoliberal wing of Labour will be some sort of an improvement is absurd to me.

I disagree. Specifically, I think that Labour is considerably more likely to be good at growing the economy and reducing the deficit for several reasons:

  • Labour is much more likely to spend money on services (and in particular on public sector salaries), rather than on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and this is likely to be better for overall economic growth.
  • The Conservatives dedication to austerity, Brexit and lettuce-brained tax cutting has been so appallingly damaging that it would be difficult to do worse.
  • Labour has not suffered from the purge of competence and expertise that the Conservatives inflicted upon themselves in an effort to get Brexit through. There has certainly been a purge of Corbynites from the party at large, but the parliamentary party was mostly dead set against him from the beginning so this was much less costly of experience and expertise what the Tories did to themselves.

There is also historical data to suggest that Labour tends to do better on economic growth than the Conservaives, which fits with the pattern that I have repeatedly observed: that, at least in my lifetime in the US, Canada, and the UK, the centre left party (Democrats / Liberals / Labour) has typically done better on some of the key measures, such as deficit reduction, than the centre right party (Republicans / Conservatives / Tories) usually try to lay claim to. (I recall some years ago finding a nice set of graphs looking at defecits in particular; alas I can't quickly relocate them, so consider this more my stating my priors than making a specific claim.)

Labour is much more likely to spend money on services (and in particular on public sector salaries), rather than on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and this is likely to be better for overall economic growth.

Unlike in 1997, there isn’t much more money to spend on services and public sector salaries. For all the much-maligned cuts in NHS spending, NHS spending grew every year under the Tories, even when inflation was almost nothing. The only way to spend more is to raise more, and that doesn’t mean taxing the rich, it means taxing everyone, either by bringing the 40% bracket down further or adding a new 30% bracket from, say, £25k, both of which would be extremely unpopular.

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