VGChartz Europeans, I need your help.

[JEMC]

Soleron said:

Kasz216 said:

Soleron said:

 

The problem with austerity is that what is politically safe to cut is cut first, not 'waste' or 'nice-to-haves'. For example, in my country this year they cut interview travel reimbursement for jobseekers, and crippled the budget for legal aid, but they continue to pursue a $50 billion single rail line, and construction of two aircraft carriers for which there are no suitable planes.

True austerity has never been seen.

Oh  I don't argue with that.

Often times polticians will cut damn near essentials rather then cut worthless bullshit waste.

Even sttill... the austerity is needed.

I did used to believe that.

But if we assume that politicians are too shortsighted to actually implement it correctly, the best course of action is just to restore consumer and business confidence. This can be done with higher spending on infrastructure/regeneration, tax incentives for business development, and in general NOT cutting things.

Basically fake recovery which will be followed by a real one born from confidence.

If you cut, you reduce the outgoings by 10% say... but the economic impact lowers GDP by 20% and you're still behind. And in reality austerity doesn't even lower outgoings. Has Greece's or Spain's or the UK's budget decreased? No.

The time for balancing the budget is GOOD times. It's not the most pressing concern vs high unemployment or prices rising faster than wages.

The biggest problem to do that is Europe and its polititians.

It's ridiculous if you think about it, but before the crisis started the members of the UE signed a deal to reduce their deficit by 2020. And they haven't been able to postpone that!

Heck, here in Spain there's a very simple pending reform of the constitution since 2005: to allow women to be Queen (needed as the nº2 in the line of succession is a girl, born that year), and they still haven't done it.  In 2011 Europe "recommended" to modify the consitution to to include an article that limits the debt the country can have and that also says that national debt is the first thing the government must pay. And they did it in less that 1 week!

Sometimes I think the best, easiest and simplest way to get out of the actual economy would be fire all polititians and start using the common sense. Am I the only one that thinks that polititians of today are a lot more incompetent that polititians from 15-20 years ago?