David Craig, on June 11th, 2013I challenge anybody to go to this website of our rising national debt and watch it go up without feeling extremely nauseous http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/unitedkingdom
As the Tories claim we’re on the road to recovery and Ed Balls announces he can save £200m by cutting benefits to any pensioners who have more than fifty quid in the bank, the figures tell a different story. We’re caught in a classic death spiral of borrowing leading to higher interest payments leading to more borrowing leading to more interest payments…………..and even if economic growth meant that taxes collected by the government went up by a fanciful 3% (£20bn) a year, our debts would still increase for at least the next 5 years and probably for the next 10 years as public spending is also going up.
The numbers are almost too huge to grasp – our debt is increasing by around £3,888 per second: £233,000 per minute: £14,000,000 per hour: £329,000,000 per day: £2,300,000,000 a week: £120,000,000,000 per year.
But, rather than bleating on about the problem, what’s the solution? There are 3 main options:
1. The Government cuts public spending by about £100bn from £750bn a year to £650bn a year. This would probably lead to massive civil unrest and would be totally impossible for any government that wants to be re-elected
2. Britain defaults and tells its creditors to get stuffed. This would actually be easy to do. Many countries have defaulted and recovered quite quickly. The problem is that this would destroy many foreign banks, British banks and insurance companies that hold almost £1,000,000,000,000 of UK government debt. Moreover, it would leave us unable to borrow and we’d be forced to cut public spending down to £650bn to match tax revenues as in option 1 above – impossible to do without causing civil unrest.
3. That just leaves one way out of the death spiral – the problem is that nobody knows what this is.
(Just a reminder – I’ve reduced the price of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED – paperback and Kindle versions – hopefully someone somewhere will now buy a copy)
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Cancelling Foreign Aid, EU subs, and shutting down most quangos as well as shelving green iniatives would see off a good chunk of the £120 billion. Then they could tighten up on corporate tax evasion, stop dolling out benefits to immigrants and the idle, whilst pulling our troops out of muslim hell-holes. Then they could spend a little time reading some of your books. Problem solved.
Echoing Paris Claims above David…
We could set the benefit system to auto-pilot and sack every civil servant, involved in cheating claimants, or patronising immigrants.
Mr. Craig, do you know the answer to the death spiral? Your figures
are horrendous. Those idiots in Parliament should be compelled to read
your findings!