Man in a Shed: Gordon Brown has cost us £50k per household ! Is that right ?

Jeff Randal has a comment piece on the cost to the country of Gordon Brown, based on the release of the book Squandered - How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money by David Craig.

Apparently Craig estimates that Brown has lost us £50k per household ! That's a staggering figure - but one I've tried to encourage people to calculate regularly in comments else where.

Frankly, if true, its worse than just incompetence ( and I take Heffer's warning on using this description as implying that the policies could have been made to work - of course they couldn't ), its greed. A post on that subject has been cooking in my mind for a while - I'll need to get it ready.

In the mean time think £50k - if your not furious with anger you haven't understood what's being said.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman