The Autumn Statement.

[Workingman]

Autumn started early and has been long, but winter will be longer and colder, and could last till 2018.

Who is Gideon kidding? Growth forecasts in the region of 2.5 - 3.0 percent! From what, where?

Winter could go on indefinitely unless we start manufacturing things to export.

The rest is pretty much as expected, and not much different from what any other party would have been able to do. Give with one, take with the other.

[KateLMead]

All that help for small businesses quickly fell of the radar Frank, it is is the state of the ark.. It wouldn't make any difference as to who is in power and we would probably be fed a worse forecast if Miliband and his band of brigands got in, remember that it was the Labour government who exacerbated the position we are in today..

[Suff]

Oh it could be a LOT worse. We could be talking about the 2 trillion deb, we could be talking 150% of GDP in debt and we could be AA on our credit rating. All with lacklustre jobs and a stagnant economy, spiralling "fixed costs" of DSS and pensions.

All we need to do is remember that Brown, Balls and Milliband thought it would be a really GREAT move to borrow £200bn per year. Or put it another way, we would be another £180 billion in debt over and above where we are now, had Labour stayed in. All for what? The Eurozone is going to drag us with it and our only salvation is a more solid economy with better debt ratio's. Something Labour would have thrown away on Votes, anything to stay in power.

It's all very easy to follow the press and say "how much worse could it be?"

The answer, of course, is A LOT!!! HUGE, massively, worse.

The bigger your economy the easier it is to go hugely overspent and consequenlty have to suffer hugely more to fix it.

I'm tired of the whole press gaggle. Remember 2010? If you vote for the 'Tories everyone will have no money, businesses will all go bust and there will be millions more unemployed and the GDP will fall like s stone.

Yes GDP did fall, but not like a stone, then it bobbed back up again and started a slow slide back to a stable level. From which it's slowly rising again.

Let's take the rhetoric out of it. We were promised disaster if the Tories got in. Disaster there has not been. OK it hasn't been pleasant but it could have been oh so much worse and certainly not disaster. In fact Cameron and Osborne have walked a fine line which has seen our annual debt growth drop, our economy stabilise and cautious but gentle growth begin to assert itself.

Disaster????

I recall the first time I played with an educational economics program on a computer. Kind of like sim country in terms of economy. The ONLY actions which produced slow and steady growth, without boom or bust, were very small tweaking of the circumstances, left for a few years to percolate through the enviornment... Whilst a computer simulation is not exaclty real life, the principles are the same, slow steady moves, left to build on their own.....

Or we could have labour. Flash, Bang, Splat........

[Workingman]

I do not have any complaints about most of what said or what was done. As I said in my OP there is not much room to do anything but tweak to make it look that big things are being done.

Growth prediction is where I think he has gone badly wrong. It is a sound bite headline statement that is going to come back and haunt him in a couple of years as we approach election time if we are not well into growth of 2.5% or more.

The odds are that we won't be.

[Suff]

The odds are that we won't be.

Pretty much a certainty. Plus if he bases his debt reduction figures on that growth, then he will be well out of whack when the time comes.

Then again, do the people want to hear the unvarnished truth. Or do they want a sugar coating???

[KateLMead]

No we don't suff.. Frank... the general public and households will follow like sheep any party that promises the earth.
What Can We Do?

Of course none of us are happy about vital cutbacks in the NHS, the military, etc. etc' our small shopkeepers have all disappeared (so much for small businesses) and our large famed companies have taken their ;businessesses overseas... and our local shops have been taken over by massive supermarkets that have taken their place in nearby towns
that means the costs of travel to them by car or bus..We read of those employed in the BBC and elsewhere, those millionaires with their tax evasion ploys and offshore accounts... The massive salaries mostly undeserving, pension pots, golden handshakes, this not only applies to the BBC but tax evasion is widespread even a ploy used by those millionaires in government. Being a woman not of great intelligence I look at the obvious simplistic things that come to our notice,sadly my brain doesn't extend to economics mathematicstics. So I am grateful to be on this learning curve.

[Workingman]

The big thing missing, and missed by the economic commentators, is the lack of any stimulus for jobs: real jobs. It has been missing for years by all chancellors,

We need jobs so that people out of work can go to work and come off benefits, and also so that those in work can move to other jobs and probably climb the employment ladder in doing so. An environment has to be created so that manufacturing can rebound. Of the millions unemployed there will be tens of thousands of highly skilled technicians and production workers hoping for such a recovery.

[Suff]

Actually the big problem is that successive chancellors have assumed that stimulating “jobs” will reduce unemployment. In fact stimulating “jobs” alone has had a double impact of continuing the unemployed and sucking in cheap labour from outside the UK.

Chancellors don’t just need to put up an incentive to create jobs and growth, they need to use their taxation powers to make it more profitable for UK companies to employ UK unemployed, rather than cheap Europeans or Asians….

That is what is missing and there should be no reason why it cannot be done. Jobstart can be so much more than just throwing a pool of people at employers. It “should” include financial incentives to take on UK unemployed which needs to run for 2 or 3 years. After that level of investment in time, employees are no longer new and are unlikely to be cast off to gain another quick benefit in reduced costs.

Even if the government were to support businesses to 50% of the full cost of DSS, they would still make out of the deal. Even if they gave a 50% cut on NI contributions for 3 years they would still make money out of it.

This is not rocket science. They just need to DO it. The biggest block would be competition laws but I’m sure they could get around that.

[Workingman]

I suppose that we could debate the best method till the cows come home, but whatever agreement we come to it remains a blind spot for Chancellors of all colours and abilities. And as I said before, a lot of economic commentators fail to mention it. Is is as though real job creation is not part of the economy - only the unemployment figures.

[Suff]

It has been a blind spot since the figures were hidden behind "unermployment" benefits rather than just "benefits". The more the reduce the duration of unemployment benefit, the more they can massage the jobs figures.....

It's fundamental, like all statistics. First find the CORRECT figure to use and then carry out the analyses afterwards. Don't take the wrong figure and sped forever dreaming up ways to "present" it.