The yearly deficit is still climbing as is the overall pile of debt.
So, if he did not lie, you would not accept austerity.
It's as simple as that
read 'em: City am
Austerity
can’t have hurt UK growth because austerity hasn’t yet begun
Tuesday
29th January 2013, 1:00am
ANDREW
LILICO
IN
ORDINARY parlance, “austerity” means a
period of cutbacks, spending reductions, and debt being paid down. So when
voters hear talk of government austerity, most of them assume that’s what the
government is doing. When they hear (a few) economists saying that weak growth
has resulted from “austerity”, voters think cuts to public sector pay and
public sector lay-offs are a cause of weak growth, and that those economists
think either the pace of cuts should slow, or even that they should be
reversed.
In
fact, total government spending is going
up and the government isn’t paying off debts at all. It is accumulating
them at a record rate. There isn’t anything happening, yet, that the public
would call “austerity”, if it understood the term properly. Journalists like
Fraser Nelson and the politician John Redwood, therefore, perform an important
service when they note that there hasn’t really been any “austerity” in that
sense – yet.
They
might also go on to note another thing about those few economists who allege
that slow growth is the result of austerity. Mostly, when they urge that “the
pace of austerity should slow”, or that there should be additional “fiscal
stimulus”, they don’t mean that there should be slower cuts to public sector
pay, or fewer similar cuts to what economists call “government consumption
spending”.
What
they actually mean is this: first, the government has raised taxes too fast,
and should have retained the flexibility to introduce temporary tax cuts as
required, without threatening its medium-term deficit reduction targets;
and/or, secondly, that the government has cut spending on road-building and
other infrastructure too fast, and should try to find some one-off investment
schemes to take advantage of low interest rates.
Yet
despite the public confusion, and the public service done by these few
commentators prepared to say the Austerity Emperor has no clothes, some senior
economists prefer to attack the truth-tellers. On Sunday, the respected head of
the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Jonathan Portes,
devoted a whole blog to attacking what he see as the “errors” made by the likes
of Nelson and Redwood.
