Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| This went into the Ross-shire just before Christmas. I got a surprisingly negative reaction from some quarters and very positive from others. I'd be interested in what people think.
The Real Economy
The Coalition is very keen to claim that the recession is over and that the economy is recovering. Why is it that most people do not feel better off? Perhaps it’s because they are not better off. Wages have hardly risen at all. Many people have had to take lower paid jobs or work less hours.
What have risen are
House prices; terrible if you are a first time buyer, positive only if you are a property trader.
Energy Prices; great if you’re an energy company or have shares in one- miserable for most other people. High energy prices make virtually everything else more expensive.
Food prices- the supermarkets mainly gain from this. Farmers, particularly tenant farmers are having their margins further squeezed. Demands on food banks have risen to epic proportions.
The National Debt; The Coalition are very keen on the idea that they have cut the deficit but that is not at all the same thing as cutting debt. In fact this is still continuing to rise to levels fairly similar to Greece.
The government suggests that the only way to improve the economy is to improve productivity. There are three ways of doing this; work people harder, give them less wages or produce the same thing with fewer resources. Most economists and politicians look only at the first two. How would it be if we focused on the third? We could re-use paper 10 times. In fact it barely gets recycled once. We could use sewage in a digester to make biogas. We could cut the expensive energy used by our homes and businesses in half. We could buy local food and support the local economy rather than most of the cost of our food going into transporting it round the world and virtually none going to the impoverished people who grow it. Focusing on exports to improve an economy makes no sense. Cutting carbon also benefits the real economy and makes it more likely that our children will still have a world worth living in.
The World Trade Organisation has just announced a deal which will reduce red tape. You can be sure this ‘red tape’ will include such things as environmental and health protection so that multinationals can have easy access to markets.
There is a peak in production and availability of resources such as oil and fresh water yet demand continues to increase. With this in mind the only way our economy can improve in a socially just way is to be more resource efficient.
It has been shown recently that if you give energy companies the responsibility of cutting energy use they will quickly realise that they are also cutting their future profits and try to wriggle out of it just as they have just done. Universal insulation and energy efficiency programmes are far more effective.
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The Real Economy