mistermack wrote:
Everything's so simple to you isn't it?
Borrow loads of money, and everyone will be rich?
You really ought to read to the end of some of the stuff you link.
There is a negative multiplier, every bit as powerful as the positive one.
And it comes into play when people buy imports, increase savings or when taxes rise.
When spending rises in this country, it's more likely to be on imports, than domestic services.
And people tend to save a bit more, and taxes have to go up, when governments borrow more.
So overall, more government borrowing is bad for the economy long-term.
The only time it's any good, is short-term, to give an injection when the MOOD is so gloomy it's causing harm. The objective is to snap the country out of a downward spiral by changing sentiment. A short sharp shock that can't be sustained, but does a job.
That's the only time that borrowing for consumption can make sense. And it's a very rare set of circumstances.
There are indeed negative economic multipliers but borrowing, as noted previously, isn't necessarily one of them. Borrowing to fund a house building program, for example, is shown to have a net positive economic effect, as in many other areas of infrastructure spending - so as with many investments it really depends on what the money is spend on in any given period.
Negative multipliers include asset hoarding, tax avoidance, moving money out of the economy, and extended periods of low-to-no growth against ongoing price inflation and wage stagnation. Borrowing to fund a privatised public services sector in which multinational companies play a significant role is a mechanism which actively drives money off-shore. So again its a matter of how and on what the money is spent.
I'm not disagreeing with the fact that maintaining high levels of borrowing as a proportion of GDP has a negative multiplying effect, at least in the short-term (and political policy-making is all about the short-term isn't it - the period between now and the next election?), and overseeing an ongoing rise in borrowing as a proportion of GDP is clearly unsustainable, but borrowing to invest in, say, food, water, and (cleaner) energy security, the housing shortfall, public transport, education, education, education, public health services, and the like generally have a positive multiplying effect - they just don't necessarily pay off politically in the short-term.
The problem with these discussions is that the government seem to have taken, and have actively promoted, a view that national borrowing and spending policy is basically analogous to managing one's household finances, where spending produces dead money (this is; a once it's gone it's gone mentality) - particular spending on luxuries. In this they have promoted the idea that public services are a luxury we can no longer afford. However, this analogy itself doesn't really ring true. For example, once you've spent £60-80 filling your tank the money has gone, but this allows you to commute to work and drive to the shops, so it's actually more akin to an investment both in your household economy as well as in the local economy.
UK borrowing is soon set to exceed £1 trillion. This is a big number. This is a VERY BIG NUMBER! But by far the biggest outlay is not spending on public services but on supporting the financial system in the form of various QE mechanisms; underwriting high street bank deposits, the Special Liquidity Scheme, the Credit Guarantee Scheme, the Asset Protection Scheme, taking RBS, Northern Rock, Lloyds, and Bradford and Bingley into public ownership, covering the shortfall of buying those banks shares high and selling them back into the market low, and the various low-yield bonds and Gilts (borrowing on future earnings) devised to maintain bank liquidity by guaranteeing their assets and speculations.
The 2007/8 collapse saw an initially massive and precedented shift in assets from the taxpayer into the financial services sector, which was deemed necessary to maintain the money supply for you and me. However these schemes are ongoing and have amounted to a total peak support of £1.162 trillion, according to the national audit office. What we have now is a system of socialised debt to maintain privatised profit, its the reason you can't get an inflation-beating interest rate on your savings and the reason our government of millionaires is so keen on The Austerity, not to reduce public borrowing but to maintain levels of financial sector subsidy (or, as they would have it, to maintain financial sector security) during a extended period of low-to-no growth and at the expense of public service expenditure.