Ouch .

Looks like the drummer boy is a fan of the late John Maynard Keynes , broadly speaking to practice this doctrine you have to start from a low base of government debt. You then borrow lots of money to kick start the economy,thus creating work and people paying taxes. You then pay off the borrowings, unfortunately we already have a huge debt so adding more debt is extremely risky. The danger being the people we borrow money from may increase the interest rate,thus mortgages and business overdrafts will rise.
I am doing my bit for the economy, I am off to the village pub for several pints of Sam Smiths fine ales, thus paying tax to the government . It's only a small gesture but one has to try.

yeah my bad, wrong office. However the statistics have been revised down by an average of about 0.2% iirc every following quarter, so lots of the quarters announced as growth we're now seeing as being stagnant or in recession. David Blanchflower has done some excellent work on this.

Backwoodsman-we do have debt, but it's important to understand what and where that debt is to properly understand risk. The massive increase in debt under Labour happened suddenly, it's not a case of it being built up gradually through lax spending. Most of the debt accrued up to 2010 was as a result of nationalising the banks we now have equity shares in.

So a large amount of that debt can be wiped down by creditors as stuff that will eventually return. The problem is not 'debt=bad' because countries, unlike individuals, pay off debt over a much longer time, debt is sustainable just so long as there is a strategy in place to pay it back. That becomes less likely when you send the economy into a period of stagnation (see Japan), as the overall shrinkage kills off tax revenue and leaves everyone worse off.

The loss of the Triple A rating was not down to too few cuts, but too many. That's why the ratings agencies, the IMF, the World Bank & every sensible economist are now saying the government needs to ease off the austerity and borrow to invest.

In 2011 the attendance was up probably because our season tickets were so cheap and we sold more. Our average attendance that year was 13967.

In 2012 we sold less season tickets but as the game could have been our 'last ever game', Bradford and Leeds fans came in their thousands to boost the attendance over 20000, over 8000 above our 2012 average of 11755.

Friday night's attendance was so low because we've sold less season tickets than in 2011 and 2012, and the match was televised.

As a Bulls fan I am disappointed that the attendance was so low but if we want a bigger crowd than that we'll have to sell more season tickets.

By the way, well played on Friday. You were far better than us.

How can it be rational to propose more borrowing when we've had to print 25% of the money we've borrowed already?

It's rational to fill the demand gap, to increase the money supply and to take advantage of the record low bond rates by borrowing now to invest and create jobs and stimulate spending. It isn't rational to have a monetary policy that is attempting to increase the money supply and a fiscal policy that is attempting to decrease it.

Well, first of all what Mervyn King said was that 25% of GDP is now QE.

The simple answer is that you'd borrow it to do different things than what this government have done. So far, QE money has gone to recapitalising banks and keeping interest rates down, not to doing anything particularly useful. So you'd borrow to get people back into work, thereby increasing tax revenues and creating a virtuous circle of growth. You don't pay back that debt straight away, the cuts come during the good times. It's the nature of governments that they have to spend & cut countercyclically. The emphasis on cutting the deficit quickly is intuitive, but disastrously misguided.

Look its simple, we are going to be saved from this nightmare by one man


Nigel Farage



*s*