Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?
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Jack Delano Worker inspecting locomotive, Proviso Yard 1942 From where we’re sitting, the biggest victory in the May 7 British election will turn out
[See the full post at: Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?]The EROEI for large political unions has been a losing proposition for awhile, but the realization of that has been lacking, and their credit has remained good, so…
Every level of organization within a system has it’s costs of support.
Costs exceed political will to pay now.“Welfare is mainly about taking money from those of working age – when incomes are high on average – and giving cash and services to older people, and families with children.”
Not in the UK it’s not. Welfare in the UK is about taking money from working people and using it to subsidise low pay and high rents from businesses and landlords.
This is a net flow of income from working people to rich people but masqueraded as “benefits to the poor”. Working credits (a.k.a. low pay subsidies) and housing benefits (a.k.a. support to landords to maintain high rents) account for a significant portion of welfare benefits. I will bet these will be protected.
“The keyword in this is ‘austerity’. The Greek people voted en masse to end it, and so did the Scots.”
They keep shifting the meaning of this non-word “austerity”. What I see generally meant in “ending austerity” is that we should keep living above our means forever. That would be nice. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics do not permit this. It seemed so when the West was stealing the resources of the BRICS nations (via rigged exchange rates) and still had a lot of internal value to destroy–liquidating factories, letting electric grids and transportation decay, deferring maintenance on houses, selling off ships and industries, getting into debt–but once the tide goes out they realize they can produce nothing, and so to keep the rich from sharing the hardship, they need to make hard decisions about who lives and dies. Me and my 2nd yacht? Or you skivers whose pension we stole? Ah, but we hold these truths to be self-evident.
At the same time, capitalism has been dead so long, there’s no one left at advocate doing actual work–aka employment–and increasing the national pie. Why would they? With the end of property rights, if you increased the pie, they would only steal it.
12B in welfare cuts? That seems ill-advised. –Not for the inevitable riots and toppling of the existing politics, mind you–I wouldn’t presume to comment on that. No, because 12B is chump change compared to the REAL welfare skivers, insider banks and corporations. In the U.S., in one initiative alone (TARP), they issued $23 TRILLION to pals, including non-U.S. companies like Toyota, European Banks, wives of members to invest in houses on Long Island, and nationally-critical companies known to be in need of funds like McDonald’s and Harley-Davidson. Presently the hundred-trillion$ edifice of Health Care, Student Loans, and Housing rest entirely on corporate welfare. Without the sectors dependent on this merging state and corporate power, there would be no economy.
I venture that $12 Billion is chump change compared to the $23,000 Billion saved by cutting corporate welfare. By a factor of oh, about 1,000. Put another way, you could instead increase social support by 1,000x, and/or reduce taxes proportionately. Why aren’t the fiscal conservatives going after the real budget savings? Why I ask, but why?
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