[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I lost respect for this lot when they started cutting taxes whilst claiming there was no way round the cuts. cLearly there is more money available than is been made out.

Where were taxes cut without balancing them through increases elsewhere?

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

The tories have a history of false ideals, the biggest one been that they overate the private sector too much.

As do Labour, the biggest one being that they overrate the public sector too much and underrate the private one.

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Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Also you gave no explanation as to how reducing spending and creating unemployment is a fuel for growth.

You've given none why spending more on welfare and increasing interest payments is a fuel for growth.

The tax cuts you so despise are a fuel for growth. Taxation is anti-growth.

---------- Post added at 14:14 ---------- Previous post was at 14:02 ----------

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

what has dissapointed me the most is not what the tories are doing but rather the lib dems.

1 - agreeing to AV as the alternative, which is still not a PR voting system.
2 - backtracking on so many of their core policies.

They are the junior part of the coalition, and for someone like me their influence is very easy to see.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

its not anything like that simple.

if public spending was lower, then the boom likely would have at best been much smaller and at worse not a boom at all.
government spending is just the tip of the iceberg, what happened with the banks was the core thing at fault, if they didnt crash then we probably would still have labour in power now spending like before.

It isn't anything like that simple either. The boom was fuelled by government policy and government spending along with private debt accumulation which was unsustainable.

Had Labour not spent money like water but instead run reasonable budgets, not involving running deficit on the books and even bigger ones off the books, the funds would have been available to appropriately stimulate the economy. As it is they did nothing to correct the country's financial situation and active encouraged people to make it a lot worse.

The behaviour of banks is, of course, an issue, but they were simply serving a need, an asset bubble born out of government policies shifting investment from pension funds into property and taking increasing amounts of tax and redistributing it as welfare.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I consider the dismantling of things like social services, welfare state, public services as more damaging than a bad credit rating and deficit. I think the average person on the street couldnt give a crap about the countries credit rating, thats just how it is. However people involved with finances and I think generally wealthier people consider things like the deficit and credit rating as extremely important issues.

That's exactly the point, the average person on the street couldn't give a crap until these things affect them, which they would. I am unsure why you are commenting on this as if it's somehow wrong to appreciate that the government spending more on debt interest than education is a bad thing, and ramping this interest payment up through further long-term accumulation of debt is a worse thing.

It is an extremely important issue, the only reason to disregard it is ignorance.

I would regard describing these policies as 'dismantling' as being typical tabloid / union news letter speak by the way.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Labour did bad things but they also did some good things which we would never has seen from a tory government such as the min wage and propping up poor areas with public sector work (I now consider this a good thing now as I learned my city will have over half of population unemployed without it).

Propping up poor areas with public sector work isn't a good thing, it's a temporary life support, in typical Labour fashion. What they should have done is what this government is doing and incentivised private sector investment in these areas to allow for longer term prosperity rather than what will inevitably happen, areas which were previously propped up by unsustainable levels of spending being hit disproportionately hard when some of that spending is withdrawn.

Fundamentally I prefer to treat people like adults, taking their money from them and spending it for them is treating them like children. Leaving them with as much money as possible to spend / invest / save as they see fit is the grown up thing to do. Labour busily taxed, spent, and indeed taxed then provided welfare to the people they were taxing. The public sector must not, and cannot, get us out of this hole otherwise we'll just be staring up at an even deeper one in the not very distant future.