Erasmus wrote:Kate, please don't take the abusive ones seriously. Some people are just unpleasant and that comes out in extreme measure when they are granted the anonymity of a keyboard.
However, I have to say that the Conservative Party DID cause austerity, or at least they made it much worse than it needed to be. As I mentioned before, they could have addressed the problem they faced by a combination of tax rises and cuts to public expenses. It is not impossible to raise taxes, especially at a time like that when they were saying 'We're all in this together.'
They took a conscious decision to go for cuts to public services as the single solution, with all the terrible consequences that this has entailed. They DIDN'T have to do this; they could have struck a balance between cuts and tax rises and the people paying more tax would not have suffered nearly as much as those at the food banks or the elderly folk deprived of proper care. It was a choice they made on behalf of the rich and in my view it was unforgiveable.
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I appreciate your views with a rationale as to why and I will reiterate that I am not defending what the Tories did in terms of austerity nothing is every perfect for any party, as you say there was a choice. Raising taxes causes any party to lose votes, this is a political consideration that all parties make and should be a balanced view and outcome against other considerations. In this particular case a financial crisis, go back and look at the national debt and see the rise in 2008/9, you will also note that it has continued to rise throughout every year up to and including this month, this provides a measure of what each government did in terms of borrowing, borrowing being the difference in what they borrow to cover the deficit or the difference between what they receive in taxes against what they spend. From my analysis the Tory government borrowed every year, did not raise taxes, but did cut in to services and spent more on services that they earned, this was there choice, right or wrong. As you state they could have had tax raises in an economy which has been in the doldrums for a long time, raising corporate tax has proven in many places to lead to job losses, raising individual taxes leads to the poor being hit hardest out of there disposable income.
I 100% totally agree that the pendulum swung to far in regard to cutting services such as but not limited to NHS/Teachers/police, I personally don't believe like many here that these services wont see more support from the government but all this has to be balanced, the national debt is to high and more borrowing, which the LibDems and Labour are advocating has to be paid for at some time. Now if you want to take national debt out of the equation and you just don't care about it then it opens up so much more, however if that is the case why would the Tories not try to outspend the other parties, particularly Labour in the attempt to gain votes, there has to be a valid reason for this don't you think?