The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Catastrophic consequences of austerity in UK

See numbers above.

Example I hope you can understand: If your GDP is $100 in 2010 and $120 in 2015, then your spending in absolute numbers pegged at 30% of GDP would go up from $30 to $36.

You're working off of the premise that government spending should be pegged to GDP. That is an area where we will fundamentally disagree. Government exists to provide certain services independent of the ratio of their cost to GDP.

Congratulations though, on once again ignoring what you don't want to address.

First, wondering where you got those - the OECD was at about 500b

Second , if you think thats harsh austerity even if that figure - especially if that figure is correct - you have a very strange perception.

UK only has ~66mil ppl for crying out loud. At that rate of spending per capita you can run a huge fucking govt apparatus, and indeed the UK has one.

If you want to argue that they are spending money on the *wrong* things, then OK. If you are trying to say they arent spending enough money, you dont have a single leg to stand on.

So couple years later, and we can look at effects of all this austerity. Brexit in UK. Surprisingly, Greece is still in EU but portion of their debt was discharged once they got out of the news. However, Ireland recovered and showing strong growth.

Ironically, Brexit passed at least in part because they said it would leave more money for their universal health plan. Which has been struggling, though remains popular.

The devil is always in the details though: where you get money and what it's spent on. Not just that a lot is spent, or, not spent, for that matter.

I think the finer details tend to get overlooked, especially in public discourse, by the philosophical heirs of Malthus and Mises both.

I don't think finer details at all matter. You shaft people, populism arises. Country ether get shafted as a result and/or get more illiberal to keep masses in check.

It's common to shaft people by both spending, and not spending, as the case may be. I've come to realize that the left-right, more-less dichotomy is mostly false.

We're mostly faced with "Heads I win, Tails you lose" scenarios.