The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Putting our money where Rudd’s mouth is > Comments

Putting our money where Rudd’s mouth is : Comments

By John Tomlinson, published 5/3/2009

With a basic income in place, the duration or depth of the recession will be less drastic than with exisiting social security arrangements.

  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. All
I agree with parts of the Tomlinson article and disagree with other bits.

You claim government will “ need to do more than hand out cheques from time to time to boost consumer spending.” This is a very trite dismissal of perfectly serious point backed by a huge number of highly qualified people, namely (and this is a very simple obvious point) that world economies at the moment suffer from a lack of demand, thus the solution is to boost the purchasing power of the source of all demand, i.e. the consumer. I can think of a huge number of Profs of economics or similar who would agree with this solution. A few are listed at the bottom of a blog of mine: http://printingmoneyisgood.blogspot.com/ But there are plenty of others, eg. George Soros, Prof Warren Mosler (Google “Mosler’s law”).

I flatly disagree with the idea that we set up “government as employment of last resort” schemes in reaction to recessions. These schemes are not particularly good at dealing with recessions (though they can help a bit). For more on this see http://employerlastresort.blogspot.com/2009/03/employer-of-last-resort.html

I quite agree when you say government “must stop compelling unemployed people to undergo a merry-go-round of short-term Mickey Mouse training programs which do nothing to increase the long-term employment skills of participants”. If you want some empirical evidence on the fatuousness of these schemes, see “Not Working” by A.Bogdanor, published by Policy Exchange, London in 2004. You’ll find a free copy on the internet.
Posted by Muskrat, Saturday, 7 March 2009 6:57:13 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. Page 1
  3. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy