Lies and Debt

Debt has become the battle ground for those who hunger for political power. Control what people think about debt and you will control them: what they think and what they will do. All the parties know this. Therefore expect debt to debase honesty the way it already has our finances.

Very soon now, the Coalition and its enemies in the UK, or the Republicans and Democrats in the US, will open up with their big guns, each trying to pound the other into submission. Deafening barrages of claim and counter claim above a hail of statistics and percentages, reports and studies, will reduce what is left of our democracitic process to the clotted, sucking mud of party politics.

Once the debt debate starts, it’s not going to be about honesty or clarity any more than war is about peace. So, just as the time to speak fervently for peace is before the artillery opens fire, so now is the brief time we have to think about our true financial position and options.

These then, for what they are worth, are a few of my thoughts.

Today’s news is all about how the Chancellor, George Osborne, has a ‘secret’ plan to slash 2.5 billion pounds from the welfare budget. Claim and counter claims are flying already.

I would like to point this out. According to the Government’s own best figures, as published here, The government has paid 105.1 billion pounds into our Big Bank’s in order to keep them alive. We have also spent a further 15 billion pounds buying up their assets and providing ‘liquidity’. Not to mention how much we have put up for the asset protection scheme which now stands as guarantee for hundreds of billions of pounds of bad and failed bank assets.

These expenditures have been paid with debt. All told the most recent and officially quoted compilation of total debts due to bank interventions is between 1 and 1.5 Trillion pounds (A trillion defined as 1000 billion). See the above paper for the citation.

Any one of these categories of expenditure dwarfs the savings from Welfare, that Mr Osborne deems so absolutely essential. I personally cannot help but wonder why he does not feel the same sense of urgency about cutting back some of these far larger debts and expenditures? Cut 2.5 billion pounds from the main bank bail out (IE take the money back out – not a hard concept even for George and his fag Alexander) and it would be a cut of barely 2.5%. So what order of priorities and concerns says it is better and more desirable for the nation to cut 2.5 billion pounds from people on incapacity benefits rather than the same amount from what we have given to the banks?

Of course those who are in favour of Mr Osborne’s plan believe with all their being, that welfare is rife with people who pretend to be ill but are in fact perfectly able to work, who just prefer to have their indolent and socially selfish life style bailed out by the rest of us. Lying in bed with their curtain’s shut, while their neighbors go off to work, as Mr Osborne so decorously put it. They see the cuts as the necessary incentive to ‘help’ those people back to work.

No such pressure is deemed a good way to ‘help’ bankers back to solvency. And nothing about their life styles, activities or bonus culture is seen by such people as socially selfish. That thought would be almost incomprehensible to them.

National debt is not a new thing. And certainly not one invented or created by the work shy on their own. We have all helped. Some by voting for expenseive wars, some by voting for tax cuts, others by being unemployed, all by using the NHS and by getting older and eventually drawing a state pension.

The most recent government figures on our national debt show that over many years, from government to government, Tory to Labour, this nation has built up a debt of about 890 billion pounds. A huge amount, that some are quick to blame on whatever party they dislike. Avoiding the truth that all the Parties have contributed. And we have voted for them to do it.

BUT through the greed, stupidity and incompetence of our bankers, by encouraging and granting unwise loans and by purchasing debt backed ‘assets’ without assessing their real worth, that level of debt, that took decades to accumulate, has been DOUBLED in just two years. We were servicing 890 billion in debt. Now we are servicing 2 trillion in debt. THAT was not done by welfare scroungers, the work shy, single mothers or their feckless, worthless, larger fuddled idiot inseminators. It was done by the wealthy and the greedy. People did not force them to give out stupid loans. They wanted to and did. For their enrichment not ours.

THAT doubling of our debt load, IS the crisis and it was done by the BANKERS. But those people are friends with our politicians. ALL our politicians. Not one party. All of them. And so the simple fact that the crisis in our debt is due to its sudden doubling, which is right there in the government’s own figures, will NOT be mentioned by ANY of the parties.

Intead we will not have any mention of any alternative view of what caused this crisis and what we might do to put right the damage it has done. Any attempt at discussion will be drowned out by the din of war between the royal houses of our political class.