I'm not an economist, politician, or banker. If I was, I would probably be infinitely richer by now. But it intrigues me when politicians whitter on about deficits and so on. The numbers seem to be huge (because, well, they are). But we never get to see them in context. So I did a little Googling, and found this page. It tells us the UK's current deficit is £159.2 BILLION! That's an incomprehensible number; if I was Bill Bryson, I'd illustrate that by saying if you had that amount of money in one-pound coins and stacked them up, it would reach from the Earth to Alpha Centauri. But I'm not, and it probably wouldn't.
Anyway, the point of this post is that the UK is currently carrying an astounding amount of debt, as a result of the moronic bailing out of the ungrateful coños who run British banks. And the ConDemn coalition are hell-bent on using this to cut every kind of public service they can think of - health, education, public transport, social housing etc.
What you probably don't know is that this deficit represents only 11.4% of GDP. That doesn't seem life-threatening to me. EU rules would like it to be about 3%, but fuck, we're all fucked, aren't we? I don't see the urgency to get this down at the expense of everything that makes a country civilized. Cameroon and co would have us living in caves.
My 2 centimos. Now I have to go out and buy the world's sharpest knife (not a threat or anything: sale at El Corte Inglés).
Never Trust an Expert... Well, not Always.
1 week ago
2 comments:
Ah, the reflected sound of underground spirits.
Not to Alpha Centauri, but certainly to the moon and then some. Unless the stack fell over, of course.
The stack would weigh over one and a half million tonnes, so might rip your pocket lining.
Ha! That's bush league. Our esteemed President managed to spend over a trillion dollars (!) with zero net result and has pushed the obligations so far into the future we're looking at TEN TRILLION dollars in debt. (That is assuming dollars are still around then)
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