George Osborne’s Game: From Austerity to Cruelty

Over at our Daily Comment blog, I’ve put up a longer post on the latest failure of austerity economics: the admission by George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, that, after two and half years of furious budget-cutting, he’s still failing to meet his own fiscal targets.

One thing I didn’t mention in that piece is that Osborne isn’t merely reaffirming his commitment to the deflationary economics of the early nineteen-thirties. He’s coupling it with an embrace of Reaganite trickle-down economics of the nineteen-eighties and the even harsher Benthamite economics of the eighteen-thirties. Earlier this year, he cut the top tax rate from fifty per cent to forty-five per cent, claiming that Britain’s highest earners needed incentivizing. Now, with roughly one in twelve working-age Britons out of a job, he’s cutting the value of unemployment benefits—a move that harkens back to the infamous Poor Law of 1834, which was designed to stigmatize paupers and vagrants.

...read more