Funding the Future

 
The government’s own data on fraud suggests it loses £58.8 billion a year, but that’s bound to be understated as there are no systems to detect fraud in two thirds of government activity. What is going on? 

The whole of the microeconomic theory of business is based on the idea that businesses maximise profit. They don’t, because doing so works for no-one. It’s a route to business failure. It’s maximizing happiness that works.

For decades we have suffered ministers who want to hold ministerial office to advance their own careers but not to deliver good government, in which they have no belief. Unsurprisingly, government that’s rotted from the top down is the result of that.

Politicians in developed countries are still obsessed by growth without realising that growth is history because as our incomes have grown, we consume fewer material items and more services, and the chance of productivity growth in services is limited, even with AI. The question is, when will politics being to reflect this new reality?

The governments accounts are incomplete and out of date and might fairly be described as CRAp – or completely rubbish approximations to the truth – so how can they govern properly?

We have only got one planet, and Trump wants to trash it. There are some things we cannot afford in this life. He is one of them.

The wealthy do – as author F. Scott Fitzgerald noted a century ago - think they’re different to us. The recent farmers’ protests proved that. Despite their wealth, farmers claimed impoverishment and demanded favours and subsidies from the state. It’s time we stopped putting up with their egocentric bleating. 

The City of London claims it is the powerhouse of the UK economy. Rachel Reeves has called it our ‘Jewel in the Crown’. But actually, it’s much more like a parasite, extracting value from the rest of the economy to for the advantage of a few at cost to most in this country.

The government’s own accounts, just released, show that its total liabilities owing fell between 2022 and 2023 by £1.5 trillion. They’re now much smaller than the figure the government claims the national debt to be. The whole claim that we’re supposedly burdened by debt is now complete nonsense. When will they admit it?

Trump’s trade wars are going to hike inflation and interest rates in the US and around the world, and won’t boost jobs in the US, or make middle or working class Americans better off. The price of his mayhem is going to be enormous.