Osborne says he won’t take us back to square one. We never left

George Osborne has been coming under increasing pressure to change course of his austerity strategy. Even the IMF – who originally backed austerity – have deserted him. Osborne is sticking to his guns however and last night, in a speech at the annual CBI dinner said:

“Now is not the time to lose our nerve. Let’s not listen to those who would take us back to square one. Let’s carry on doing what is right for Britain. Let’s see this through.”

So the message is that doing anything additional to help the economy would “take us back to square one”. But how does “square one” compare to now? Assuming square one would be the situation Osborne inherited in May 2010, have far have we come since then? Here’s a few quick stats and commentary.

1) The Deficit

2009/10: £159bn

2012/13: £121bn

So the deficit down by a quarter. This seems to be the thing Osborne is most proud of, but – putting aside the fact that the deficit on its own is neither good nor bad – this reduction has been achieved primarily by cutting capital expenditure in half. From right to left, almost all commentators believe capital spending is precisely the thing not to cut, so in trying to lower that headline deficit figure, he’s actually setting us up for problems further down the road. Square one with double the capital spending actually sounds quite attractive.

2) Unemployment*

3 months to March 2010: 2.51m

3 months to March 2013: 2.52m

Yes, you read that right. Unemployment is actually higher now than in the comparable quarter in 2010. We are still at square one!

3) Employment*

3 months to March 2010: Employment rate – 72%; Total Employed – 28.83m

3 moths to March 2013: Employment rate – 71.4%; Total Employed – 29.71m

The Coalition like to say it has created 1 million private sector jobs. The net additional jobs since March 2010 though has been just under 1 million, and the working age population has risen faster than that, so the employment rate has actually fallen. Square one would actually be an improvement here.

4) Real Incomes

Median hourly earnings 2010 (constant prices): £11.92

Median Hourly earnings 2012 (constant prices): £11.21

Real incomes then have fallen since 2010, so again, square one doesn’t look too bad.

5) Interest Rates 

10 year bond yield May 2010: c3.6%                                          

10 year bond yield May 2013: c1.9%

Interest rates are another success Osborne likes to trumpet, and they have come down since 2010 (although by May 2010, they were already coming down). Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on whether you are a borrower or saver, but assuming they are a good thing, how much credit should Osborne take for them? According to Jonathan Portes, not much.

In conclusion then, if Osborne were to change course, taking us back to square one, what would that look like? The deficit would be higher, but so would capital spending. Unemployment would be slightly lower, and a greater proportion of people would be employed. They’d also be paid more for that work. Interest rates would be higher (although on a downward trend). So the overall economic picture has barely changed since May 2010. I haven’t even mentioned the almost complete absence of economic growth since then. It looks like we never left square one. Going back there would actually be a slight improvement, and if we could go back there, but deploy our resources smarter than Gordon Brown in 2009/10, a huge one.

* Labour market figures sourced from ONS here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/index.html

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More arguments to counter myths about austerity

This post follows on from part 1 here. Here’s three more commonly heard arguments made to justify austerity or policies associated with it.

1) Gordon Brown spent all the money and now there’s none left. Just ask Liam Byrne

This line of argument conjures up a couple of misleading images. The first is that somehow there was a bank vault somewhere full of money which Gordon Brown kept dipping his fingers into and spent without putting any aside for a rainy day. He didn’t “fix the roof while the sun was shining” as right wing buffoons are fond of saying.

This is quite easy to counter. The next time someone says we’ve run out of money, just ask them how that is possible when the government can print money? They’ll probably look at you like you’re mad, and then say something about hyperinflation, but they will have to concede that we can’t actually run out of money.

This moves the conversation onto inflation. Won’t printing money cause inflation? Printing money cannot and does not cause inflation. If the government printed £100bn and just left it in an account at the BoE, how could that be inflationary? It’s the spending of money that can generate inflation, but government money creation is no more inflationary that private money creation by the banks. The inflation comes from too much money chasing too few goods i.e. the constraints are real – the ability to produce goods and services – not financial. Money can and should be created up to the point where the economy is at full employment. If the private sector does not create sufficient money to get us there, the government should make up the shortfall.

The other part of point 1 above I object to is the oft repeated line about Liam Byrne’s famous “no money left” note. If anyone drops this into the conversation, it’s your turn to look at them like their crazy and say i) the note was a joke; and ii) Liam Byrne is a joke.

2) Cutting x will save £y

This is a very common argument we hear, often in relation to welfare cuts e.g. uprating benefits by 1% will save £3bn and this will reduce the deficit by £3bn. That is the gross saving only though. The government may pay out £3bn less to benefit claimants, but this in turn means they have £3bn less income and £3bn less to spend on goods and services in the private economy. Those business then have less sales which means they pay less tax. Because of lower sales, they may need to let staff go. Those staff in turn then may claim benefits, so it’s easy to see that cutting payments to benefit claimants may actually end up increasing the deficit rather than decreasing it.

This is why you hear a lot of right-wingers say that there have been no cuts. They see the deficit rising and think its because the government is not cutting enough, when in fact it’s the cuts themselves that are increasing the deficit, and outcome predicted by many Keynesians.

3) What would you cut?

This is a common response by those in favour of austerity to those arguing against the cuts. There are a couple of unspoken assumptions behind this statement: i) deficit reduction must be a specifically targeted policy and is an end in itself; ii) the only way to achieve this goal is to cut spending and/or increase taxes.

The first assumption is false because it misunderstands what a deficit is and what it tells you. I explained this a bit in part 1. What the government should actually target is unemployment, poverty, living standards etc i.e. things that actually impact upon people’s lives.

The second assumption is also wrong. In fact the opposite is true. I would argue that cutting spending and raising taxes will increase. not decrease the deficit, and any attempt to cut the deficit through austerity will ultimately fail.

With these two things in mind, the question “so what would you cut” should be rejected out of hand. The question we should be asking is how best to reach full employment, how to reduce poverty, increase living standards. Only when we start asking these questions will we start to find solutions which actually bring about economic recovery and reduce the deficit to boot.