Sunday thoughts

I wonder sometimes about politicians, they never seem to have an original idea. Labour is now formulating policies with 99  weeks to go to the general election. They seem to be planning to do the same as the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. More cuts and more clueless action…

I’m not really in favour of expanding the money supply and inflating away the country’s debts, but I think that would be fairer. It would devalue the pound further and make exports cheaper while making imports more expensive. That would mean more expensive petrol and gas. We could get rid of VAT on energy to compensate and even cut duty on petrol and diesel. So imported cars would be more expensive and people would have to pay more for their Iphones. So what?

We need to get back to basics. People need water, so lets freeze water and sewage charges. We need to keep warm in winter, so freeze energy costs. We need a roof over our heads so freeze social housing rents and build more social housing. Young people need places to live and older people need to be able to downsize and move from owning their own homes to renting to release the equity in their homes. We also need healthy cheap food and good health.

We can also look at what we don’t need. We don’t really need more fancy art galleries and leisure centres. We don’t need more motorways or airports. We don’t need high speed rail. We don’t need more traffic calming or more immigration. We don’t need another baby boom, we need population control. We don’t need new iconic public buildings, we need to better utilise the ones that we have.

It seems that weather experts are going to have a conference to discuss why we had a crap summer last year and a colder than usual winter. What’s the betting that they all go to that conference on expenses that will will pay  and come to the conclusion that it’s global warming and climate change. Then they will decide that higher fuel prices will deter us from doing any more damage to the environment. We don’t need more talk.

Maybe the local councils could have ‘social jobs’. When people are unemployed the council could give them a job and train them to do a skilled job like painting and decorating or they could mow the grass in the park and learn about gardening until they can get a ‘proper job’. Local colleges seem to teach the theory and the young people still don’t get a job. Would you pay some young person to do some decorating or gardening? I think there is possibly a demand for these skills and with the right training, many young people could start their own businesses in the community.

There will be a G8 summit soon, when the world leaders will get together and discuss the world economy. The consensus seems to be for cuts in public spending. It’s working so far isn’t it? How about all the governments agree to print a shed load of new money, all at the same time. Money is the unit of exchange for exchanging goods globally, so more goods should be exchanged. That would produce growth and wouldn’t put up the cost of imports. Growth however, would mean more global warming and another conference about the changing weather…

What do you think? Any ideas? Please share your thoughts in the comments box.

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