In the 80s & 90s there was a consensus among economists that employers NICs were a terrible tax as they were a tax on jobs. What changed?
if you'd like to read my thoughts on male *historians* explaining things to me, here they are www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781...
Strategy is about choices. The UK's industrial policy makes them. What next? My first substack (!): what the new strategy does and doesn't do and what are the consequences its real choices? open.substack.com/pub/anthonyp...
The UK’s industrial policy makes them. What next?
Quite. Also, the quoted section promises to "look at regulation where it is needlessly holding back the investment" without actually specifying what precise regulations these are. This suggests the antipathy to "regulation" is founded on something other than empirical evidence.
One of the many virtues of fullish employment is that we don't need to court bad employers, as better ones will supplant them. The "any job is better than none" mindset is a legacy of mass unemployment: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The prime minister says transport secretary Louise Haigh's criticism of a ferry company is
This govt (unlike Thatcher or Blair) doesn't have a vision of modernity of its own. This means that it buys into capitalism's version of it, even though this is overhyped & scammy (See also AI).
There's nothing M about it. We've known for decades that the economic limit on govt borrowing is inflation; the political limits might be different.
Yes. Also, Labour isn't thinking enough about how to reallocate labour - nor about whether to raise the inflation target.
Yes. The thing is that crowding out cuts both ways. Useful infrastructure projects can be crowded out by socially useless private sector activity: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...
Many technocrats think the UK is at or around full employment. What they don't say is that this requires some radical thinking about economic policy. The Bank's chief economist Huw Pill recently said ...
One day, politicians will learn that the binding constraints on public investment aren't made-up fiscal rules but real resources: labour, materials & the management skill to deliver projects on budget. I fear they might have to learn this the hard way. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Exclusive: Chancellor’s plan to change rules to allow more borrowing comes as cost of government debt rises