Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
It’s 40 years of neo-liberal capitalist economics that has lead to here. Selling everything off helped massage the figures in the interim. But here we are saddled with all the debt and no more windfalls.
Your graph will also be skewed by changes in GDP, as opposed to considering the real terms value of the debt itself.
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Inflation also skews the real-terms value of the debt - i didn't see you hurrying to make appropriate caveats to your bald figure of £2tn. Besides, the impact of GDP is a perfectly right and proper consideration. The debt is only a problem if it can't be serviced. GDP indicates how serviceable the debt is, which is why it is relevant, and why the PA chose to express the national debt in those terms in that graph.
Further ... loose monetary policy was a far greater contributor to the supposed 'massaging' of public sector net debt in the second half of the 1980s than selling off state monopolies, though I grant you, getting unprofitable heavy industries like coal and steel off the balance sheet did it no harm. Ultimately we can't tell where monetary policy might have ended up because the ERM debacle intervened.
And on that point, I note that many of the same people who said we should be in the ERM, also said we should be in the Euro, and continue to say we should be in the EU. But I digress.