Budge-this

My favourite budget bit so far is “We are also taking the opportunity to rebuild Britain’s reserves, which had fallen to historically low levels. I can confirm our gold holdings have risen in value to £11 billion. This does not include the 400 or so tonnes of gold sold a decade ago for £2 billion, and which would now be worth six times that at over £13 billion pounds.” i.e. Gordon-the-gold-seller-Brown, you are one seriously useless fucktard.

The 7% new stamp duty rate on £2m plus houses combined with the new 15% rate if you bought them through a company is also awfy cute the way it tells Bob Geldof and co they can try and dodge the stamp duty us plebs pay if they want by buying via a company, but it’ll cost em’more if they do.

In the background to this though and the next few budgets is the supposed reality the Fitch rating agency spelled out when they issued the following chat to explain their decision to move Britain to “negative outlook”: “The triggers that would likely prompt a rating downgrade are … : -- Discretionary fiscal easing that resulted in government debt peaking later and higher than currently forecast;” (then 2 other triggers are mentioned, one is “blah blah blah” and the other “ya de ya de ya”).

Now Fitch is very clearly using jargon to mask an assertion of ignorant and very debateable prejudice. Negative outlook? That’d be them saying we think certain factors means that a downgrading of Britain’s credit rating has become a real possibility, which matters because markets respond to changes in outlook as well as actual ratings. And for both a negative move typically sees governments having to hand over more tax payer fivers to cover its debts. Discretionary fiscal easing? Hmm, that’s quite a cute one really; discretionary? That’d be what a budget is. Fiscal policy? That’d be about taxing and spending.

So essentially, Fitch said in the immediate run up to the budget don’t cut taxes or increase/not reduce spending in ways we don’t like or else i.e. it’s an assessment that can be read as a warning that’s open to interpretation as a threat.

Of course a rating agency would never see things like that, they only ever provide independent opinions based on privileged access to company data after all that others are “free” to choose to act upon or not (similarly, shops only sell guns whereas it’s the psychopathic outsiders who actually use them to shoot their classmates). And yet would a more active, discretionary fiscal policy be a bad thing?

Paul Krugman certainly thinks it wouldn’t, similarly John Kay today talked about how increased public spending on construction in its widest sense would “as the National Audit Office recently observed, be likely to reduce public expenditure over the medium term, not to raise it. The weakness of current – necessary – austerity programmes is that they focus on capital projects and expenditure deferrals because these cuts are easy, even though they are precisely the opposite of what is needed to balance the books in the long term. We need to devote much less attention to headline spending totals and much more to the detailed composition of public expenditure.” Heck, even this joker thought this was a good idea in 2009 cos he’s also mindful of how cos counter-cyclical government spending “leaks” in an open economy such as the UK there’s a need to focus on stuff that doesn’t like building shit. Except, these kind of grounded in facts but still – lets be honest – ideological views are effectively being swept aside by chat like Fitch’s, which is a bad thing.

Fitch’s chat illustrates perfectly the kind of dogma and prejudice that continues to define the terrain on which British fiscal policy is now set and its overall direction. This makes it a clear assault on democracy and, in the view of all sorts of bods, one that is actively shitting on the prospects of both the British economy and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people left unemployed as a result.

Am trying to think how to draw this to a close, howzabout: The budget is shit and all the ConDems should be made to dress up like girly shepherdesses. This is cos government passively accepting the undemocratic constraints on its fiscal freedom private companies i.e. rating agencies, are imposing is a very, very bad thing.

Instead the debateable analytical and moral capabilities of the latter and of the "market" more generaly should be recognised. Thereafter, these external bodies should be held up to more and more aggressive public scrutiny and regulated til they squeal like pigs.

We should also have, because we need it, a huge increase in public sector debt funded public spending on construction. Given the Labour response has been to fixate on the tinkering and ignore the overall thrust of fiscal policy, Milliband and Balls should similarly be ordered to dress up as shepherdesses complete with pink gingham bonnets. There.