Man in a Shed: May 2015 General election

Monday, April 20, 2015

Time's running out

Well we are heading for the last two weeks + of the campaign.

Things haven't gone well for Labour or the Conservatives as they haven't been able to get purchase on each other - indeed to a large extent they haven't tried.

Cameron must now be thinking about defeat - will the Conservative party really tolerate him if he doesn't deliver a majority ?

UKIP are fighting the dirty tricks squads of all sides, the inbuilt bias of the BBC and Channel 4. Also fighting hard to be heard - but take note getting better all the time.

The Conservative spin machine is trying to push the story that UKIP are on the back foot, in an attempt to make a self for filling narrative.

The media is campaigning rather than analysing. Spin is now the accepted replacement for politics - and the public switch off as a result.

You can't help but think we will be at this again in 6 months time.

PS Sorry its all a bit quiet - but I suspect you can figure out why ...

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