The Financial Times has this morning produced a blinding set of graphs which highlight how fiscal austerity has negatively impacted on the GDP of various European economies.
The Financial Times (£) has this morning produced a blinding set of graphs which highlight how fiscal austerity has had a negative impacted on the GDP of various European economies.
Essentially, the greater each government’s austerity drive the larger the drop in GDP. Are you listening, Mr Osborne? The third graph (furthest to the right) is the important one (the horizontal line depicts the level of austerity from 2009-2012 and the vertical line shows the fall in GDP.
The coup de grace is delivered, however, by Paul Krugman of The New York Times:
“Austerity was costly for the afflicted economies: the greater the tightening between 2009 and 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund, the bigger the fall in output.”
Thus, FT journalist Martin Wolf adds, “the panic that justified the UK coalition government’s turn to a long-term programme of austerity was a mistake“.
“In the long run, the fiscal deficit must close. In the short run, the UK has the chance to push growth. It should take it. So should the US.”
62 Responses to “FT pulls apart austerity economics”
henrytinsley
So it appears you don’t actually know the figures after all.
And you are unable to refute my argument that Hitler was a right winger except by repeating the name of his party. Completely irrelevant.
LB
I don’t care what left/right label you want to put on him.
He was a socialist. He viewed himself as a socialist. Lots of his policies are no different from socialist parties in the UK. e.g Beverige and Eugenics.
henrytinsley
You obviously know nothing whatsoever about history, and are completely careless with facts. Over and out.
LB
Not at all. The problem you face is that Hitler was a racist murdering socialist.
You don’t want to be associated with those policies, bar the socialism.
So what you’re doing is a bit of Stalinist revisionism. If we define Hitler are right wing, we define the Tories or anyone we don’t like as right wing, and then by association group the two together.
The problem is that history and the facts are against you.
Hence your problem in coming up with any numbers in your game of top trumps for killing, when it comes to the right wing Killers. Franco killed quite a few, but the Socialists killed more than Franco in single days compared to a life time for Franco.
Guy Halsall
Who is this idiot LB? Hitler a socialist? This is the Right’s latest myth. OK he had the word socialist in his party’s name. He also had the word National and Democratic in NSDP’s name. He tortured and imprisoned unionists, socialists, communists and had the support of conservatives. Because he believed in a strong state does not make him a socialist. Left-wingers believe in a strong state as the best insurance of the basic freedoms of the majority, but they also believe strong social institutions to moderate the state (Trades Unions etc). None of this has anything in common with Nazism, which believed in a Nation that was bound in a sort of feudo-vassalic relationship (hence their emphasis on oaths) to their war-leader, the Führer: nothing socialist about that. If the Nazis were socialists how come the BNP and their ilk, who hate socialists, are always denying the holocaust and giving Hitler salutes? Your comments are no more than mindless trolling. You clearly know even less about history than you know about economics. Who pays you?