The Guardian has gotten its hands on some unpublished, official estimates at what will happen when the UK government’s proposed budget cuts get enacted: 1.3 million jobs lost in public and private sector both:
Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.
The chancellor gave no hint last week about the likely effect of his emergency measures on the labour market, although he would have had access to the forecasts traditionally prepared for ministers and senior civil servants in the days leading up to a budget or pre-budget report.
A slide from the final version of a presentation for last week’s budget, seen by the Guardian, says: “100-120,000 public sector jobs and 120-140,000 private sector jobs assumed to be lost per annum for five years through cuts.”
Supposedly the private sector will jump to the rescue by creating more jobs than are being lost this way. This while the markets are flat and businesses are barely surviving rather than growing. Any fule can see that if the government, the one remaining source of investment also throws in the towel, there’s nowhere new jobs can come from…
Paul Krugman meanwhile warns for a third depression that won;t go away quickly, thanks to:
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
As I said before, that’s what happens after thirty years of indoctrination about the power of the markets, the need for small government & balanced budgets and the inability and illegitimacy of government intervention in the economy. There’s a learned helplessness amongst our political elites, who not just are incapable of thinking of alternatives, but are now unaware that neoliberal capitalism isn’t a law of nature.