Funding the Future

Trump is promising economic and social mayhem for the USA, and all those places it influences. Will he deliver?

Looking at the people who now describe themselves as politicians it’s reasonable to ask why they are pursuing that vocation because they don’t seem to have a conviction of consequence between the lot of them. Could it be that they’re a bunch of dopamine junkies, in it for the short-term fixes politics gives them?

Labour claims taxpayers would face a massive bill for nationalising the water industry. But that’s not true. If a fair price is paid for the businesses and their debts, nationalising should impose no cash cost on the Treasury at all.

When crashes happen vast quantities of money are reported as being lost. But are they really? Or is it that they actually just cease to exist? It’s an important question, needing an answer. 

Rachel Reeves must think the only job a government has is to balance its books. There can be no other explanation for the insanity of calling in bankers to advise on the NHS.

The UK’s domestic properties need transformation if we are to meet out climate targets – and we need a carbon army of trained people to undertake that task.

Trump is planning trade wars and sanctions that are bound to crash the world economy. But what he knows is that the resulting bailout will make the wealthy even more wealthy, yet again. His policy is both mad and entirely rational from his viewpoint.

Democracy is under threat around the world from the politics of hate peddled by the far-right. In political terms, the opposite of hate is care, and the problem is that care’s gone missing in the mainstream political narrative.

The government’s own data on fraud suggests it loses £58.8 billion a year, but that’s bound to be understated as there are no systems to detect fraud in two thirds of government activity. What is going on? 

The whole of the microeconomic theory of business is based on the idea that businesses maximise profit. They don’t, because doing so works for no-one. It’s a route to business failure. It’s maximizing happiness that works.