“Last time, most of us fell for it. This time, it is critical that we do not. Because, in reality, the crisis we just experienced was waking from a dream, a confrontation with the actual reality of human life, which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.”
David Graeber – After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep
Rishi Sunak is looking to raise funds! So says an article in the mainstream media this week. Raise funds for what? A gym, a swimming pool or perhaps tennis courts for his £1.5 million manor? No, nothing so trivial! The article, like so many over the past few months, was speculating on how the Chancellor might get the public finances back on track after the huge spending response by the government to keep the country economically afloat and functioning during the pandemic.
What’s it to be? Capital gains tax, targeting public sector pensions, abandoning the pensions triple lock, cutting public sector spending, raising taxes, or perhaps increasing National Insurance (to fund the proposed social care reforms if they ever get off the drawing board). After all, you’ve got to find the money from somewhere, haven’t you? At this point one cannot help but note with a hint sarcasm, that an excessively wealthy Chancellor is now considering cutting benefits for some of the poorest people in our society, putting balanced accounts over people’s lives.
Last week, the BBC covered yet another fake story about government borrowing. It reported that whilst overall borrowing was down on the same time last year, the government had spent a record £8.7bn in interest on repaying its debts in June, three times as much as in June 2020, as a result of inflation which had raised the value of index-linked government bonds. It also noted that debt to GDP was at its highest since the 1960s.
In the same article, the Chancellor, whilst patting himself on the back for the ‘unprecedented package’ of pandemic support, the only option that he actually had to keep the economy from taking a nosedive, commented that he needed to ensure debt remained under control in the medium term and indicated that his ‘tough choices’ in the last budget were ‘to put the public finances on a sustainable path’.
The IFS, relishing its doom-mongering task, as always, said in July that they expected that the ‘tough choices’ would continue, even if the economy appeared to be recovering more quickly than had been expected at the last budget. It noted that ‘permanent economic damage’ had been done by the pandemic, and that rising debt interest costs meant that, under their forecast, the Chancellor would have little, if any, additional headroom against his stated medium-term target of current budget balance (borrowing only to invest, not to fund day-to-day spending) in this year’s Autumn Spending Review. Analysts did, however, stress that despite record interest, debt servicing costs as a share of GDP remained low by historic standards.
Ruth Gregory, a senior UK economist at Capital Economics, said that ‘the public finances should reap the benefits of a fuller recovery in GDP than the OBR expects, meaning that the deficit will fall still further.’ Assuming of course that the proclaimed recovery remains on track, which is looking less and less certain.
You can trace in the above text a common theme. Tax, borrowing, deficit, debt, and fiscal headroom is the vocabulary of choice by politicians, journalists and institutions when describing how the government spends. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the public accepts the deficit and debt fairy tales.
Whilst it may be the case in terms of how the public accounts are presented, the reality is that it is merely an accounting framework which fails to reflect the capacity of the UK government, as the currency issuer, to spend money into existence, and is designed to keep a lid on monetary reality.
Instead, the media in its analysis, acts to reinforce the incorrect narrative of how the government spends, and focuses either on the capabilities of the chancellor of the day to manage the economy in a fiscally sound manner, or aims to shock the same public when the deficit and debt increase, leading to false accusations by the political opposition of economic mismanagement and spending beyond the nation’s means.
We can certainly expect more of this household budget nonsense in the months to come. After a vast round of government spending to prop up the economy, someone’s got to keep the public’s expectations in check, to keep the status quo in place by suggesting that government must balance its books, sooner or later.
In this, the journalists fall over themselves, as Will Hutton did this week in an article discussing the current economic situation, to frame the issues as per usual in terms of borrowing, deficit and debt, as if they represented monetary reality. To give him his due, he was clear, in a deficit dove sort of way, that the spending responses the government had made to address the prevailing economic conditions had been necessary to stop the economy from crashing, and went on to suggest that such spending would need to continue to support the economy. However, even if he didn’t say it, caught as he is like many others in the false paradigm of how the government spends, he will be equally quick to suggest at some time in the future that whilst we might continue to borrow while interest rates remain low, eventually there will be a reckoning and government will have no alternative but to curb its spending and restore fiscal discipline.
Now is the time to challenge this notion of monetary scarcity, and also the economic orthodoxy which has done huge harm to the UK, and also globally.
As the MMT Lens has noted many times before, it’s not the state of the public accounts that are important in themselves, but the economic conditions that lie behind them. What choices did the government make, faced with those economic conditions? What did the government do, or not do, who benefited and who did not?
The media, acting like a magician using his powers of sleight of hand, guides the public to be afraid of public debt and its consequences, when all the while the future of the planet hangs in the balance, not just in terms of planetary degradation, but also the poverty and inequality which will continue to grow without urgent action.
We need a State of the Nation Address to make clear what the consequences of the ideologically driven policies of successive governments and their spending choices have been, and most particularly over the last decade. While the rich have benefited from an ever-larger proportion of wealth, the living standards of successive generations have fallen, increasing poverty and inequality.
The ‘cheap as chips’ economy flourishes increasingly for only one section of it. The corporate sector. Earlier in the year, it was reported that the wealth of the world’s billionaires had grown by $4tn during the pandemic, despite the global economy suffering its deepest recession since the Second World War. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates are just a few of those who have come out of the crisis unscathed, and in some cases even richer.
At the other end of the wealth scale, the gig economy continues to flourish for owners of exploitative companies like Deliveroo, whose workers can earn as little as £2 an hour, unscrupulous employers employing the dirty tricks of fire and rehire on the back of the pandemic, and a continuing low wage economy (even if some sectors are under pressure due to shortages). When the question is asked why such employment standards have been allowed by law and why have they persisted under successive governments, there is only one answer; that those successive governments have served their corporate friends and their own interests through the revolving door, rather than those of the electorate.
This week, the charity Citizens Advice warned, as many have been doing over previous months, that the government’s planned £20 a week cut to Universal Credit could drive 2.3million people into debt. That includes people who were already struggling to make ends meet before the pandemic as a result of government policies.
A survey had shown that more than a third would be in debt after paying just their essential bills, if their benefits were to drop by £20 a week. This increased to half of claimants in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ areas. The organisation is warning of a ‘triple whammy of benefit cuts, rising energy bills and further redundancies as the furlough scheme ends, which will push families into hardship.’
Dame Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, described the cut as “a hammer blow to millions of people”, saying that it undermined the chance of a more equal recovery, by tipping families into the red and taking money from the communities most in need.
Whatever happened to Boris Johnson’s levelling up plan? In his usual defence of cutting the Universal Credit uplift, he suggested that claimants should rely on their own ‘efforts’ rather than accept ‘welfare.’ More ‘it’s your own fault if you can’t find a job’ neoliberal twaddle!
Whilst some in the media suggest that cutting the uplift would create electoral risks for Conservative constituencies in the Red Wall, they often fail to bring attention to something much more significant. That the poverty which preceded the pandemic, although alleviated by the increase in Universal Credit, is not a blip of nature, it has been politically induced. Johnson’s mantra of ‘getting people into work’ is no option at all, if wages are not high enough to keep people out of want. It helps no one apart from profit-seeking business, and the irony is that in the end, the whole economy suffers. People are poor, not because of their shortcomings or because they are lazy shirkers and not trying hard enough, they are poor because the government has decreed they should be.
The media should name the economic ideology that drives poverty and inequality and creates the vast disparities in wealth that we are seeing today. Neoliberalism. A phenomenon which has captured political parties, institutions, and the media which parrots its tenets of faith. The fact that many on Universal Credit are in work, surviving from hand to mouth on low wages, is a red warning indicator that something is wrong. It is an indictment of the government that poverty and employment insecurity has been built into the system to serve its corporate supporters who lobby to serve their own profit interests. But neoliberalism teaches, falsely, that government has no power to change the economic paradigm, and that its policies are constrained by scarce monetary resources. It is the spread of neoliberalism’s teachings that has prevented people from seeing the possibilities for positive change.
It was depressing this week to read about Labour’s plans for overhauling the Universal Credit System through allowing low-income workers to earn more, without seeing a cut in their welfare payments. The phrase ‘making work pay,’ featured in the presentation of their plans, which was horribly reminiscent of Iain Duncan Smith’s dictionary of human torture which informed his welfare shakeup and the Universal Credit Plan in 2010, and which incidentally and shamefully Labour supported. What changes? Labour sharing a bed with its corporate friends alongside the Tories, when it had the opportunity to break free of the economic ideology which has done so much damage already.
With increased knowledge about the capacity of government to act, it doesn’t have to be this way. With a government that puts the needs of its citizens at the top of its agenda, it could, through adopting full employment as a policy objective, and the implementation of a Job Guarantee, ensure that people are paid a living wage instead of what happens now, which is, in effect, a wage subsidy to help out their corporate friends.
Since the government is the price setter for labour through its legislative capacity, a Job Guarantee would help both those in work on low wages and those who are involuntarily unemployed and seeking work. A centrally paid for employment scheme, paid at a living wage set by the government, would provide training, give people dignity and purpose as well as offer a transition into better paying, private sector employment, as and when economic conditions improve. That is the best option of all.
The macroeconomic bottom line is that people with more money in their pockets spend it back into the economy, thus benefiting their local communities and the wider economy. They can pay for the real essentials like rent, food, clothing, and travel, with enough left over for life’s pleasures. Nobody should have to rely on food banks to feed themselves or their children.
What’s not to like? It’s a no-brainer. The economy would benefit, (which in an alternative world to the one we currently inhabit should be the aim of all governments whichever side of the political spectrum they stand) and working people would benefit through increased financial security and improved health and well-being.
Furthermore, with the challenge that is being presented by the urgent necessity to address the climate emergency and work towards a just transition to a truly sustainable world, it offers us an important opportunity to rethink the way we do things, re-examine what work is, and move towards a world that is less oriented towards the consumption of things, to a world concerned with sustainable living and dedicated to fulfilling public purpose. We need to do this within the context, not of monetary constraints, but the very real constraints related to resources.
This week the Financial Times ran an article with the headline ‘Climate action will stall until the finance problem is solved’, in which it said:
‘The options are to raise debt, raise taxes (including wealth taxes) or adopt a wartime mentality. None are politically attractive which at a profound level is the reason why the finance question remains unanswered, and the climate crisis remains unresolved’.
On that basis, as humanity sinks beneath the waves, the politicians will still be puzzling their little brains about how to pay for it, when all the time they should have been looking at the real and finite resources we will need to deliver a green transition, and how they can be shared fairly to create a more equitable world. As a social media friend commented, referring to what would have happened if the government had said in 1939 at the beginning of the second world war, ‘We will not defend Britain until the finance is sorted’, it would have been lunacy. The government did what only it could do to prepare for the battles to come, it spent the money into existence, whilst at the same time, offering war bonds to remove private purchasing power to ensure that it was not competing for the resources it would need to prosecute the war. Those same tools can be used for a just, green transition.
When the fate of the planet and its citizens are at stake, it is a paltry and self-serving argument to ask how it will be paid for, or to claim that balanced budgets must come before action on climate, poverty, and inequality.
Whilst we may indeed have to develop a ‘wartime mentality’, we should interpret that, not as deprivation but as an opportunity for cooperation. A transformation from a society of endless consumption of things we don’t need, to one which really delivers public purpose, a society formulated around human and planetary well-being. A cup half full and not half empty.
Such a world seems light-years away, when the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, continues to advocate a ‘free market’ approach to the economy, that same approach which has created the structural weaknesses revealed over the past year and that will do nothing to save the planet. Whilst, at the same time, right-wing journalists mourn massive state intervention and a culture of unlimited spending (even though it’s poured vast sums of public money into private profit) and promote instead a return to the good old days of unrestrained growth and market dominance.
But in the light of the challenges we face, it is time to acknowledge the damage this approach has already caused and will continue to cause if we fail now to rethink how we live.
Finally, with the news that global trade uncertainty continues to affect the economy, retail sales suffered an unexpected fall in July, and figures show that consumption has levelled off. It rather takes the shine off the expectation that people would be anxious to spend their savings as soon as they were able to, thus saving the government from the ignominy of having to admit that its growth expectations were miscalculated or wishful thinking. The exhortation to spend has fallen flat on its face, for the time being at least.
The elephant in the room crashes about as the government continues to ignore its role in the economic trends, which were already weak before the pandemic as a result of cuts to public spending. And, that it needs to spend sufficiently to deal with the ongoing economic uncertainty and create confidence that government actions are operating in the favour of working people and their families, not the politicians’ corporate friends. In such circumstances, it is clear that those lucky enough to have savings are reluctant to splurge out, just in case things go pear-shaped, and it ignores the many who have no such savings and who have been living on the edge for years as a result of government spending and policy decisions.
While the government continues to threaten more cuts and more public sector austerity to pay down the imaginary debt, the removal of the Universal Credit uplift and potentially the pension triple lock, with the still to come uncertainty surrounding the planned withdrawal of furlough arrangements, people will continue to hunker down after a short flirtation with spending, if they had anything to spend.
Such a strategy, based as it is on a false narrative of government spending, and the evils of deficit and debt, and spending beyond the nation’s means, will constrain the government’s promises, weak as they are, to act on the climate crisis and address the consequences of their own ideologically-driven policies.
If we are to avoid further planetary degradation, destruction of land, resources, and biodiversity, and all that will mean for the future survival of human beings on this planet, we cannot afford to ignore the warnings. We have no monetary constraints, only real resource ones, and it is now for governments across the world to cooperate to ensure that we can deliver a sustainable global economy and a fairer distribution of real resources in both the poorest and richest countries alike. Everything is possible with political will, if we choose it.
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