Faisal Islam at Channel 4 Factcheck claims to have witnessed "the most egregious statistical chicanery...in a Treasury fiscal event in 13 years of covering economics for newspapers and TV".
Faisal Islam at Channel 4 Factcheck claims to have witnessed “the most egregious statistical chicanery…in a Treasury fiscal event in 13 years of covering economics for newspapers and TV”.
What is he so excised about? Have a look at this:
‘I was quite shocked to hear the chancellor claim that investment spending would be £50bn. This would be fiscal stimulus territory. I got some return tweets about PSGI: “Public Sector Gross Investment”. Then the chancellor talked of £300bn of investment. That too sounded quite high. Again it was gross investment.
‘The traditional standard measure of government investment spending is “net investment” which accounts for depreciation on the government’s giant stock of capital. It is the way government investment has been measured for decades.
‘So it was a bit cheeky, a little cute, for the chancellor to switch measures for his speech. This is clearly part of an effort to communicate a narrative of “investing in growth” as we go “from rescue to recovery”. The real numbers would have to wait until the fiscal documentation was published.
‘Alas it was nowhere to be seen. The only reference to net investment was as a footnote to a table about the impact of the Royal Mail pension. Nothing. Nada. Gone. Erased. PSGI is now the only measure, and it has the happy side effect of sounding bigger.
‘However you can compare PSGI announced today to PSGI in March in the OBR’s table. Miraculously those numbers are idenitical to the number’s published today. Actually that’s not quite right: this year PSGI is £100m less than forecast by OBR in March. So, officially, capital investment by government has been CUT. That’s not the impression you would get from the chancellor’s speech.’
16 Responses to “Channel 4 highlights Osborne’s ‘grossly misleading claims on investment’”
DJT1million
Thanks for all that well rehearsed verbiage. You’re wrong of course, it’s a version of the same stuff that has been implemented over the past 30+ years or so and it is part of the wider economic consensus that is currently failing.
Examples include low corporation tax, currently lower than they have been for a long time and yet investment remains stubbornly low.
Low taxes? Most of the big businesses and wealthy individuals are avoiding paying any taxes on an industrial scale whatever the level, a problem that is seriously destabilising our nations finances.
Pensions? Really?! The lie that they are unaffordable is often repeated but remains a lie.
Welfare? I think you mean social security spending, more than half of which is the aforementioned state pension, a pension that’s lower than our competitor nations by some measure.
The main reason our governments spending is climbing is because there is no economic growth and falling tax receipts, both situations they have a degree of control over and yet refuse to do basic stuff like close tax loopholes, manage tax havens that are under our control better or invest in education/apprenticeships (fill that skills gap), infrastructure, roads, rail, housing…..I could go on but you know it, you just don’t believe it.
Funny thing is, your approach has been increasingly followed since the mid 1970s and has caused the biggest financial crash since the C19, my approach was followed in post war Britain and resulted in a pretty stable economy with improving living standards across our nation for decades. I know which one I would rather have and it’s not the current car crash of a system that is failing all but the very rich.
LB
Pensions? Really?! The lie that they are unaffordable is often repeated but remains a lie.
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Really? I think its you who are deluded on the cost.
How much does the state owe? Its been spending all the money for pensions, so it does owe people a pension for their contributions.
Or are you one of those people who claim the state owes people nothing for their money? [So long as you get your cut]
I know how much they owe, because I know where the figures are and how they have been hidden.
I’d be interested in your number for how much they owe, and hence how you conclude that its affordable,.
DJT1million
Now you are just tying yourself up in knots.
I love it when commentators say such things as (and I paraphrase) ‘I know The Truth and you plebs (implied) don’t!”
The State does not take in taxes and then stop at a given point, it is a process. People work, businesses prosper, they pay their taxes and those taxes pay for current needs along with appropriate investment for the future.
In the the future, those people and businesses will pay their taxes and so on……as a child I was educated and went to University. Now, as an adult I pay my tax & NI which pays for those being educated now…that’s the way it works. Or should work, now we have a significant portion of wealthy individuals and large businesses that feel they don’t have to pay their taxes and it is one of the factors that is gradually damaging our nations finances. Not the only factor but a big one, it needs to change.
LB
Simple question. You’ve said the state’s pensions, state pension and civil service, local government etc are perfectly safe and will be paid.
To come to that conclusion, you must have done a bit of maths to work out how they can be afforded.
So can you post up your numbers so I can compare them against mine, and the official numbers,
I’l start you off. Bar the local government scheme, the others are unfunded. So they hold no assets that have value. I presume you do agree that you can’t owe yourself money? So no assets. Next you would need to have an idea of how much they owe for the money that you and other people have paid. At least you’ve been paying.
So how much do they owe?
Then we can move on to what income they need to be able to pay the pensions.
DJT1million
That’s not a simple question and you know it, there’s no-one that could provide such a comprehensive and completely accurate set of figures covering all those different elements. You want to ask the question simply to show that I couldn’t answer it in the detail you demand and therefore undermine anything I say, a familiar debating tactic. It won’t wash.
I love that you will be comparing ‘my’ figures against ‘yours’ and the ‘official’ stats though, nice touch….and also some distance from the actual subject of this article noting that Osborne has lied about the levels of investment he is proposing. Oddly that is the one thing you haven’t talked about though there was a bit of irrelevant ‘whataboutery’ concerning Labours record on investment. Funny that….