Quote:
Originally Posted by DanaC
Here's the thing though: if the govenment is spending all that money on benefits, that means all those people claiming have money to spend on food and soap and shampoo and milk and all those basics. If the benefits are only meagre, rather than inadequate for even basic survival, then they may also be spending on cheap tvs and toys for the kids at Christmas, the odd day out at Alton Towers during the summer holidays, a cup of coffee from a cafe whilst they're out and about. And any other of those cheap, small luxuries that made life more than mere subsistence survival.
Now, on the one hand you can look at that and say why should my taxes pay for them to do more than scrape by? On the other hand you can recognise that all that low level spending goes into the high street and the businesses that need customers in order to stay in business...
And if benefits are so meagre that it becomes impossible to live on them at all, then those with jobs also stop spending. Because who can risk spending when tomorrow may bring unemployment and that bring destitution?
And if all those people aren't spending, then the places where they used to spend will not thrive and will cut their cloth to avoid insolvency.
The tories have created, and will continue to create a secondary recession that is entirely demand led. And the more they cut the money in people's pockets, the more they cast unemployment as the bottom of the barrel, as the moral failure of those without jobs and as the most broken picture of existence, the more fearful those in work will be and the less able those out of work will be to participate in the market at even those most basic levels. And so demand will continue to fall and the demand led recession will continue to deepen.
But the top tier of society do not feel the recession. The top earners in the UK have increased both their wealth in real terms and their share of the wealth of the country. Whilst paying a smaller proportion of that wealth and income in taxes. And the gap is getting bigger, and it is getting bigger faster with every passing year of this.
That's why they're doing this. Everything they do increases the wealth of their own peers. The fact that there are families with two working adults that still aren't earning enough to put food on the table and clothes on their kids' backs is an irrelevance to them. And those who lose their jobs due to this demand led recession are no longer of any importance except in their function as warning signs to keep the rest of us focused the wrong in our anger.
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And this is exactly why I said earlier, you cannot cut your way out of a recession. The less people have, the less they spend, the less service jobs there are, less people employed as profits are down, and the cycle repeats again.