The government wants you to believe that the public purse is empty and needs replenishing to set the finances straight. It’s not and it doesn’t. Time to challenge the lie or accept the inevitable economic consequences
Over the last few months, GIMMS has focused on the on-going impact of both politically derived austerity and the Covid-19 pandemic on the nation, along with the prospects for the economy in the future. Every week, we have aimed to build a picture of a nation where Covid-19 has revealed the stark nature of the consequences of economic ideology, government policies and spending decisions which have shaped our society over decades which has not only deprived many of economic stability in terms of employment and standards of living, but also skewed the distribution of wealth and resources towards an ever-smaller group of people. At the same time, we have continued to challenge the all-pervasive narrative that government spending is just like our own household budgets.
The two are intimately connected as political ideas and the usual explanation for why the government has to pull in its horns and reduce its spending. And yet in recent months as Rishi Sunak did what was necessary to keep the economy ticking over, bills paid and food on the table, people must surely be asking some difficult questions about why, if there was no money for public services in the 10 years leading up to the pandemic, that suddenly there is no shortage of it. How to explain this to the public? It seems contradictory to what we have been led to believe.
It has been encouraging to see that finally people are beginning to ask questions and that modern monetary realities are being discussed in the public domain. However, it would seem that as soon as a flicker of light at the end of the fiscal tunnel appears, the fiscal hawks get back onto their ideological saddles to keep the lie going that there will, in the end, be a price to pay.
Indeed, this week Philip Booth from the right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs claimed in an astonishing article in The Telegraph that young people should be just as concerned about rising public debt as climate change. He asked how can a young person be concerned about climate change and then complain about austerity but not be worried about increasing government debt that future generations will have to service?
Aside from the prospect of environmental decay and its human consequences – which surely must be a more pressing problem in terms of humanity’s future – in making an incorrect connection between an ageing population and a reduction in tax revenue, his words are aimed at creating more fear and preparing people in an endless repetition to accept there will be no alternative to tax increases to pay for it. While Mr Booth gets all hot and bothered at the thought of a £2 trillion debt noose which is more than 100% of GDP, he clearly missed the economic history lesson that after the second world war the debt to GDP ratio stood at 248% and yet we managed to build a successful economy alongside the public and social infrastructure that has provided a stable and secure framework for the nation’s overall health, until more recently that is.
Combining this fact with the monetary realities that sovereign currency-issuing governments like the UK’s have to spend first in order to collect any tax at all (which is exactly what the government has been doing even if it hides its action in the smoke and mirrors of ‘borrowing’) it is difficult to understand how in a sluggish or depressed economy such as will be likely maybe for years yet that the IEA would suggest increasing taxation. In an environment where demand is already suppressed as a result of Covid-19, that would be the most irresponsible action depriving working people of more of their income and forcing difficult decisions about their spending priorities – rent, bills, food or indeed discretionary items.
At the same time and in the same article, Paul Johnson from another right-wing think tank the IFS (Institute of Fiscal Studies) warned that the UK will have to compete for scarce finance as other countries run up ever-increasing deficits to fund their own Covid-19 recovery packages. The suggestion that money is scarce is just another distortion of monetary reality and fails to focus on the real challenge that all governments face – that of balancing the economy by matching their spending to available resources. There is no shortage of money, but it suits politicians and institutions to persuade us that there is.
The implication that rising debt poses a long-term threat to prosperity by imposing a debt burden on future taxpayers, or indeed that there is a scarcity of money, is just another irresponsible fear-inducing narrative aimed at restoring the household budget status quo which has suited and served the political, financial and corporate classes for too long. It suggests fear on their part that they are losing their grip and consequently a good time for a continuing challenge!
However, whilst the right-wing are preparing the ground to reinforce their political power, not just monetarily but through continuing with their long-held aim to destroy the last vestiges of democracy and our welfare state, the left-wing and other constituencies continue to shoot themselves in the foot, thus helping the right-wing to maintain the household budget illusions to serve their own interests.
The campaigning body 38 degrees sent a petition email to its supporters this week in which it said:
‘Rumours are swirling that [Rishi Sunak] is considering raising corporation tax to help pay for vital public services. It means companies will have to pay a little bit more tax, to help fund our schools and NHS and get out of this crisis.’
As already noted, this would be exactly the wrong time to increase taxes, but implying that such an action is needed to fund public services is just another example of how the household budget model reigns – not just in the minds of those in the political arena (even though one might question that they know perfectly well how the public money system operates) but also more broadly in the public consciousness, campaign groups included.
Let’s be clear at the risk of repetition: spending precedes taxation, therefore a sovereign, currency-issuing government neither needs to tax to spend or to borrow to cover its deficit. Once the monetary framework is understood, then it becomes clear that all spending decisions are political ones deriving from a political agenda. Who wins or loses out and how we want as a nation to see real resources distributed are the real question we should be asking; not mithering about the state of the public finances – that’s just part of the smoke and mirrors being perpetrated by government to serve their own agenda.
In this week’s Times, it was suggested that Treasury officials were planning to plug the ‘hole’ in the nation’s finances by raising corporation tax. At the same time, the left argues to increase it to pay for public services! As Professor L Randall Wray notes, ‘they compound their confusion – not only do they insist on being wrong about the purpose of taxes, but they also embrace one of the worst ones’. The stakes are high now in terms of the future of the economy so either argument is entirely based on the wrong premise that raising taxes will perform a specific function. However, the left wing’s focus on making the rich pay is as erroneous an argument as raising tax to get the finances back into balance is.
However, returning to the subject of corporation tax for a moment, whilst the government does not need tax to spend, it does need to implement tax reform within the context of creating a fairer distribution of wealth and resources – that being one of the real purposes of taxation.
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the already existing inequalities which have deepened over the last few months. Moreover, the economy over decades has been skewed towards benefiting those who are already some of the wealthiest at the expense of working people in terms of standards of living, well-paid employment and good terms and conditions.
George Osborne cut the corporation tax rate to one of the lowest in the world in the belief that wealth trickles down. Lower taxes mean businesses will invest more, employ more staff, increase wages or pass benefits onto customers in lower prices, or so the trickle-down mantra goes. What it does, in reality, is increase profits and any benefits that are accrued are passed directly onto shareholders, thus reinforcing the already existing inequalities.
However, it is important to note that tax reform will be but one of the ways of rebalancing these inequalities and should be combined with:
- direct government action in the form of increased spending on the public and social infrastructure which supports a healthy economy and
- a Job Guarantee to bring about a rebalancing of the power structures towards working people whose standards of living have been eroded by decades of wilfully created unemployment to suit the corporations.
In conclusion and with the question hanging in the air as to how this huge injection of public money will be paid for being raised daily, we point to Ari Rabin-Havt’s article in the Jacobin in which he notes that the ‘The government’s pantry isn’t bare – the people’s pantry is bare’ As he concludes:
‘We cannot simply be satisfied with making policy arguments against austerity and the serial exaggerations of fiscal warriors. We need to wipe from our lexicon their ignorant metaphors that equate government financing with household financing. When they are wielded as part of our policy debate it should be met with pure derision.”
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