Debate Magazine
1. Reader's Letter Of The Day from The Metro (page 14) If the unemployed are made to pick up rubbish, what will happen to those already employed as street cleaners? Or are they also destined for the dole queue? Trevor Beake, Kent. The Homey-In-Chief Emeritus on top form: IT is time for Americans to decide: do they want to be a social democracy, Eurozone style, with high levels of tax and public spending, or do they want to be a small state society, with low taxes and low levels of public spending? That's the point. "The Americans" have decided, and they decided long ago. By and large, taking federal, state and local government, US tax and spend levels are not wildly different from European levels. Obama was re-elected recently and Obamacare (for all its faults) has been duly authorised, despite the desperate attempts of the US medical-industrial bloc to prevent it. If you judge a policy by its detractors, then Obamacare looks like a good thing to me (although trying to make employers pay for it is stupid, they ought to pay for it out of general taxation or taxes on land values, or the government could just set up its own hospitals and provide free treatment). And as Obama explained patiently yesterday (the first speech he ever gave which was intelligent and incredibly funny), the expenditure has already been authorised and tax levels have been agreed, so approving the "debt ceiling" is largely a formality (spending minus tax receipts = deficit, end of) : "Think about that. If you buy a car and you've got a car note, you do not save money by not paying your car note. You're just a deadbeat. "If you buy a house, you don't save money by not authorizing yourself to pay the mortgage. You're just going to be foreclosed on your home. That's what this is about." 3. From the FT: Some of Britain's leading mortgage lenders have expressed misgivings about the government's latest "Help to Buy" initiative, leaving the state-backed banks Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as the only pair to have endorsed the scheme.(1) Help to Buy, launched in April, was originally designed as a government loan scheme to support buyers of new-build houses. But the second phase of the scheme, fast-forwarded to this week from its original launch date of next year,(2) offers a government guarantee for higher-risk mortgages on any kind of home. Many bankers are wary of the uncertain capital treatment that will be applied to the mortgages and the risks that will be created by low deposits and high loan-to-value ratios.(3) 1) Is it a coincidence that only the two banks directly controlled by the UK government* are joining in the fun? * As opposed to the UK government, which is indirectly controlled by the banks. 2) They are starting to panic, this must be a good sign. But going by the success of all the fancy schemes which both Labour and Lib-Con governments introduced over the last five years, it won't be. 3) If only they'd thought like this ten or fifteen years ago, when the bubble was just starting. Query whether they actually think like this now, or whether this is just a plea for more generous handouts?
