How’s That Austerity Working Out?
The BBC reports that UK GDP figures show slower growth of 0.2%
Growth in the UK economy slowed in the three months to 30 June, partly because of the extra bank holiday in April.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 0.2% in the second quarter, according to the Office for National Statistics, down from 0.5% in the previous quarter.
The ONS said growth had also been slowed by some other one-off factors, including the Japanese tsunami.
Chancellor George Osborne said the growth was good news, but Ed Balls accused him of choking the recovery.
About that “extra bank holiday” – that was the wedding. Are they really trying to convince people that the wedding didn’t generate more economic activity than a run-of-the-mill Friday? Are they really attempting to convince people that the wedding wasn’t a major plus for the UK economy? That wedding was probably the only reason the quarter wasn’t negative.
Austerity is not the way out of a recession, and never has been.
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“Austerity causes jobs” is in line with “tax cuts cause jobs”, there is no empirical evidence to support either notion, yet they continue to get trotted out like Granny’s pet nostrum for treating corns, year after year, despite the fact that they don’t — and never have — worked. And if you point out that they don’t work, the only response of the true believers is the same as the response of Communists when you point out that Communism doesn’t work — “there’s never been any true Communism”, “the spending cuts just weren’t big enough!” or “the tax cuts just weren’t big enough“. It’s as if they’d drank a small amount of cyanide to treat their ills, got sicker, then decided the solution was to drink more cyanide. Ideologues just don’t seem to be able to understand that if a little doesn’t help, a lot isn’t going to help either. Inexplicable.
– Badtux the Baffled Penguin
These are people who believe in the ‘confidence fairy’, the ‘free market fairy’, ‘bond vigilantes’, and bow down to the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™, but they expect to be taken seriously.
Jon Stewart had a segment about this last night, and dragged out a hammer and sickle! 😆 Was funny stuff! 😀 He had Juan Williams as his guest, and I found him very eloquent and agreed with him (generally). No wonder he was (wrongfully) sacked from NPR! 😉
You have noticed of course that you are no longer allowed to call the greedy wealthy bastards *wealthy*. No, they are now (and henceforth) to be known as *job creators*! This in spite of the evidence that these are the very same people primarily responsible for the increasing unemployment in the USA (and elsewhere) because their first response to dipping profits is to sack people and/or move operations to one of the slave-labor countries (which is also why they want slavery re-introduced in the USA).
Juan Williams was fired because he is an anti-Muslim bigot, and said so in public several times. His job was as a news analyst, and it is hard to be considered impartial when you openly say you hate/fear a major segment of the world’s population.
It wasn’t the first time he had made the mistake of stating his bias on Fox News, which is why he got fired. He was specifically told not to do it by his boss, but he did it anyway.
The ‘job creators’ are very nervous because they have been taking all of the money from the tax cuts and buying the Treasury bonds that are being issued to cover the revenue lost because of the tax cuts. There is nothing else to invest it in now that they have plundered the US economy, especially manufacturing.
He may well have been. *shrug* I don’t know. He explained what happened from his point of view, and if true, is understandable. Jon accepted it. *shrug*. All I can say is, he made sense to me and was right in his views about Washington, and the whole USA right now. As for the rest… considering what passes for news media there, I doubt anyone who wasn’t directly involved knows the whole truth (about much of anything really, a point he made). 😉
After I posted I remembered the final straw that caused the firing – he was told that he had the right to say whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, as long as he wasn’t identified or introduced as an NPR news analyst and made it clear that he was speaking for himself. He didn’t follow that simple rule and got fired.
These guys have contracts, and those contracts tend to be extremely specific. Normally companies just don’t renew the contract when they want to get rid of someone, but Juan was fired.
There was video of the incident that precipitated the firing, and Bill O’Reilly not only identified him as an NPR analyst, the graphics also used the same introduction. Williams went into his rant without any disclaimer of any kind.
It is almost automatic with reporters that they start with something like “speaking only for myself …”
Williams wanted to move to Fox and needed to break his contract. Getting fired solved his problem and made him a martyr for Fox. His period of unemployment was measured in nanoseconds, so the contract was probably already written and approved by Fox before he was fired.
People on the left have been complaining about Juan Williams for years, as he consistently tilted things to the right. He may sound fine, but his Fox News bias is always just below the surface. In comparison to Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck he comes across as a Marxist, but he is a Republican all the way.