[Politics] Liz Truss **RESIGNS 20/10/2022**

[Guinness Boy]

Very well articulated, some excellent points made.

Except for the fact he’s complained that all MPs are vilified and then called them all egomaniacs!

 

[Green Cross Code Man]

Sir Max is my favourite author, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting twice and I enjoy listening to his opinions whilst not always agreeing with obviously. Rather than cite “3rd division talent” and all that, I do think we need to stop always (always) blaming the Politicians and start looking a bit closer to home. For who else votes them into power? We have created this mess. That’s the bottom line. To think millions still believe Boris should be given a 2nd chance! Sake, the electorate are more fickle than football fans seemingly! There is hope though. Yesterday I nearly crashed the car when a young Tory MP on the radio actually took responsibility, apologised and admitted they’d made a serious misjudgement backing Truss. Maybe politics is now so sick that MPs ready to give honesty a go?!

I heard that too. I agree 100%. Wouldn't it be wonderful if politicians all acted like that. He also said, and I have heard several other Tory MPs state the same, that it is not a time for party politics (referring to their party, not Labour as who could blame them for making hay etc) but the countries future is at stake. It is a great pity that we have had to get to this crisis point for the penny to finally drop. I understand that everyone and every party holds various stances on everything, but is it too much to ask that we all bear in mind that in the end most of our wished for endpoints are crudely sympathetic?

 

[deletebeepbeepbeep]

This is the thinking within the BBC.

'Who is in charge? Liz Truss or Jeremy Hunt?'

Who is in charge? Liz Truss or Jeremy Hunt?

The new chancellor has junked the prime minister's economic strategy in 24 hours, writes Laura Kuenssberg.

www.bbc.co.uk

​

It is pretty clear Hunt is now de facto PM and Truss is sucking her thumb somewhere.

 

[pb21]

It is pretty clear Hunt is now de facto PM and Truss is sucking her thumb somewhere.

Yes, there was an interview with him yes where he was saying he has been bought into sort out the mess and that he will, whilst also stating various policies completely at odds with Truss'.

She is PM in name only.

 

[rogersix]

This comment just made me laugh out loud. You dont know how wrong you are. I`m nothing like you imagine. As I have pointed out earlier in this thread many of the developers of MMT are completely grounded in the finance industry and banking they are not all ivory tower academics. They know plenty about the "real world" of economics and finance, and the complexities of the UK exchequer and the US Fed unlike their critics . For example Warrren Mosler, who I consider a genius, one of the founders of MMT, trained as an automotive engineer and economist, owned his own high performance car factory, and ran his own Bank., Hardly someone who is "talking nonsense about a subject he knows very little about"

i tried to put this on your thread, but that has been closed. i know i shouldn't, but here we go,

1. how old are you?

2. how long have you been a convert?

3. what are the main benefits for society should it adopt mmt?

please note, you are not obliged to answer any of these questions

 

[Motogull]

I partly agree with you. The electorate are partly to blame for getting us into this mess. Two groups of voters in particular - those that vote along X Factor lines and vote for popularist candidates and those that would vote for a xxx ( select an animal of your choice ) just as long as it was wearing the correct colour rosette. It would be a far better situation if everyone was a floating voter.

BUT it is not helped by the poor quality of candidates - when you have a choice of bloody awful, uttely terrible and f***ing dire on the ballot paper - as many often do - we're in trouble regardless.

Sometimes democracy fails 'us'.

Is it same process for Lab and Con contests? From the outside you can blame the MPs for giving the members a shit choice, then you blame the members for their choice.

Cummings was right when he said the system should not have allowed a Corbin v bungle**** GE. The con members had a chance to put a grown up, and we know the rest.

 

[Ethelwulf]

Truss hiding away this weekend when she should be facing up to her f*** up

There has to be a general election sooner rather than later this can’t go on

Truss will go down as the politician that put the final nail into both the union and the Tory party

 

[WATFORD zero]

So Jeremy Hunt who was knocked out in the first round of the Conservative Leadership contest from a very large field, with the lowest vote of any candidate and now finds himself running the Country.

Funny Old World, isn't it

 

[timbha]

It’s a bit like cricket. Don’t judge until you’ve seen the other side bat!

 

[drew]

The problem as I see remains Brexit. It was the factor that persuaded many to switch their vote to the party that promised it. Corbyn, in many eyes, still has splinters for seemingly sitting, unconvincingly, on the fence which allowed Johnson and Cummings to dictate the direction of the election of the 2019 and end up with a massive majority. They promised oven ready deals and many fell for it.

There were, and always will be, people that would vote Brexit irrespective of the outcome. The voters that were important were those in the middle area, ie those that may have been undecided right up to the point of the ballot box. Had they been better informed by Remain or had there been more honesty by Leave then the vote could have gone the other way in 2016. It would have taken about 650k voters to vote a different way for the result to have been changed. That of course led to the rise of Johnson and 2019 and his oven ready deal which he didn't really support. Don't forget Johnson purged the Tories of many Remainers before that election just to strengthen his position but that effectively meant the party lurched to the right.

The next election is Labour's to lose and we could well see a similar majority that Blair enjoyed in 1997. Here's hoping we don't have to wait too long..

 

[BenGarfield]

i tried to put this on your thread, but that has been closed. i know i shouldn't, but here we go,

1. how old are you?

2. how long have you been a convert?

3. what are the main benefits for society should it adopt mmt?

please note, you are not obliged to answer any of these questions

I don’t see the relevance of 1 & 2 to the debate. I can tell from your question 3 as I suspected that you don’t have the foggiest idea what MMT is. As I have repeated seemingly ad nauseam on this thread it’s not something you “do”it describes something that “is”, a description of the functioning of economies with a sovereign fiat currency. I and half time pies have given copious references so that you can understand MMT. So having to repeat myself over and over again is to quote Swansman getting f***ing boring. Make a start by looking at Wikipedia which unusually for that organisation is fairly good.

 

[KZNSeagull]

I don’t see the relevance of 1 & 2 to the debate. I can tell from your question 3 as I suspected that you don’t have the foggiest idea what MMT is. As I have repeated seemingly ad nauseam on this thread it’s not something you “do”it describes something that “is”, a description of the functioning of economies with a sovereign fiat currency. I and half time pies have given copious references so that you can understand MMT. So having to repeat myself over and over again is to quote Swansman getting f***ing boring. Make a start by looking at Wikipedia which unusually for that organisation is fairly good.

I will give you a chance to add something to this discussion. Try not be insulting in your reply:
My rudimentary understanding of MMT is that full employment is a goal and tax should only be used to contain inflation. Considering that the UK is almost at full employment and inflation is booming, how will creating a load more money alleviate the current problems?

 

[WATFORD zero]

I don’t see the relevance of 1 & 2 to the debate. I can tell from your question 3 as I suspected that you don’t have the foggiest idea what MMT is. As I have repeated seemingly ad nauseam on this thread it’s not something you “do”it describes something that “is”, a description of the functioning of economies with a sovereign fiat currency. I and half time pies have given copious references so that you can understand MMT. So having to repeat myself over and over again is to quote Swansman getting f***ing boring. Make a start by looking at Wikipedia which unusually for that organisation is fairly good.

I'd love to think that even you're starting to see the funny side, but I'm sure that's not true

At this rate, after over 20 years on NSC never having needed it, I may have to finally take up a frequently mentioned part of NSCs functionality which I've never come close to even thinking about (and considering the various 'Accounts' in that time, that really is some achievement)

 

[rogersix]

I don’t see the relevance of 1 & 2 to the debate. I can tell from your question 3 as I suspected that you don’t have the foggiest idea what MMT is. As I have repeated seemingly ad nauseam on this thread it’s not something you “do”it describes something that “is”, a description of the functioning of economies with a sovereign fiat currency. I and half time pies have given copious references so that you can understand MMT. So having to repeat myself over and over again is to quote Swansman getting f***ing boring. Make a start by looking at Wikipedia which unusually for that organisation is fairly good.

I have, so there are no tangible benefits whatsoever in adopting your belief system, you're not much of a salesman

 

[Baldseagull]

Because I assign importance to it - its subjective. I value the skill of Mitoma but not that of Graeme Smith. It has nothing to do with money if thats what your getting at. Explain to me why you consider MMT to be false?

I was meaning things that have a value most agree on. Gold for example, there is only so much of it is one reason it is valued highly, it doesn't corrode and become intrinsically less valuable over time is another. If a huge amount of previously unknown Gold was discovered, and the cost of extracting it was low, Gold value would decrease, sometimes even the suggestion that a lot more Gold will be hitting the market will decrease the value, as confidence in it's future value will diminish a little.
Money can also corrode though, in that inflation eats away at its value over time, you can print more of it, but that inevitably increases inflation, if it is greater than the demand for that currency, and it devalues the currency. Mitoma is valuable because there is a demand for his services, if there were 20 Mitoma's and only 15 clubs looking for a player like him, then a Mitoma would be less valuable. You might get away with there being 16 or 17 Mitomas, because one or two will be held in reserve by big clubs, but at some point, an excess of Mitoma's will devalue Mitoma's.
MMT pretends that a Government can just spend and spend without balancing the books, and stop inflation running away by increasing taxes. But where does it go when you can't raise taxes further? How likely will it be to collect all those due taxes when people are struggling with high inflation, or have clever accountants and access to Tax havens and foreign exchanges? How long before highly taxed people just start asking for payment in currencies that hold value, or returning to a barter system of exchange?
MMT also takes no account of what the real world believes, and how it will react. See what happened with the Truss budget, lets assume that what you believe will work, could work, it would still depend on the large majority to believe it will work, because you have to trust that the piece of paper we exchange for goods and services, is not just a a piece of paper. A fiat currency is only worth as much as people trust it is worth, when a Government treats it like monopoly money, it will be valued like monopoly money.
Yes I have heard of QE, no it is not the same, it is right in certain circumstances, not all circumstances.

In short, it is bollocks.

Edit: I should add, at the point MMT needs taxation to control inflation, doesn't it start to look like a more traditional model, where the books need to be largely balanced?

 

[Guinness Boy]

I don’t see the relevance of 1 & 2 to the debate. I can tell from your question 3 as I suspected that you don’t have the foggiest idea what MMT is. As I have repeated seemingly ad nauseam on this thread it’s not something you “do”it describes something that “is”, a description of the functioning of economies with a sovereign fiat currency. I and half time pies have given copious references so that you can understand MMT. So having to repeat myself over and over again is to quote Swansman getting f***ing boring. Make a start by looking at Wikipedia which unusually for that organisation is fairly good.

If it’s something that “just is”, like breathing, then you don’t need to keep mentioning it.

It’s not though, is it? It’s a discredited pseudo science that has to have very certain conditions to “just be”, cannot be backed by a mathematical model, urges the printing of additional money (great idea right now, not) and is, for the last time a THEORY and not fact. The T in the title is a giveaway

 

[BenGarfield]

I will give you a chance to add something to this discussion. Try not be insulting in your reply:
My rudimentary understanding of MMT is that full employment is a goal and tax should only be used to contain inflation. Considering that the UK is almost at full employment and inflation is booming, how will creating a load more money alleviate the current problems?

I’ok try not to be insulting but the previous poster was testing my limits. At last a good question which I will have to consider before I reply in full.

 

[GT49er]

The problem as I see remains Brexit. It was the factor that persuaded many to switch their vote to the party that promised it. Corbyn, in many eyes, still has splinters for seemingly sitting, unconvincingly, on the fence which allowed Johnson and Cummings to dictate the direction of the election of the 2019 and end up with a massive majority. They promised oven ready deals and many fell for it.

No, forget the 'oven ready' bit - that really is just remainer rhetoric.

The reason many pro Brexit voters (the ones that weren't racist, homophobic, zenophobic and thick - and whose normal inclination eould be to vote Labour) voted for the Tories is that they were the only party that could be trusted (yes, a strange word to use for the Tories, but in this case approppriate) to actually homour the result of the referendum and implement it - and actually leave the EU.

What is important now is for Labour to re-assure us that they will not try and take us back in. I know Starmer has said the right things, and the manifesto mentions working with the EU (so presumanly not within it) but I'm not 100% convinced that Labout members and activists - let alone the champagne socialist wing! - are 100% on message with the party's official stance. The next election is Labour's to lose - but they could still manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if they try hard enough!

 

[dazzer6666]

The problem as I see remains Brexit. It was the factor that persuaded many to switch their vote to the party that promised it. Corbyn, in many eyes, still has splinters for seemingly sitting, unconvincingly, on the fence which allowed Johnson and Cummings to dictate the direction of the election of the 2019 and end up with a massive majority. They promised oven ready deals and many fell for it.

There were, and always will be, people that would vote Brexit irrespective of the outcome. The voters that were important were those in the middle area, ie those that may have been undecided right up to the point of the ballot box. Had they been better informed by Remain or had there been more honesty by Leave then the vote could have gone the other way in 2016. It would have taken about 650k voters to vote a different way for the result to have been changed. That of course led to the rise of Johnson and 2019 and his oven ready deal which he didn't really support. Don't forget Johnson purged the Tories of many Remainers before that election just to strengthen his position but that effectively meant the party lurched to the right.

The next election is Labour's to lose and we could well see a similar majority that Blair enjoyed in 1997. Here's hoping we don't have to wait too long..

Don’t really want any party in charge to have a big majority, allows them far too much leeway to do what they want (as Johnson proved). Small majority with a strong opposition, regardless of the ruling party - we’ve had neither for several years now and it shows.

 

[WATFORD zero]

No, forget the 'oven ready' bit - that really is just remainer rhetoric.

The reason many pro Brexit voters (the ones that weren't racist, homophobic, zenophobic and thick - and whose normal inclination eould be to vote Labour) voted for the Tories is that they were the only party that could be trusted (yes, a strange word to use for the Tories, but in this case approppriate) to actually homour the result of the referendum and implement it - and actually leave the EU.

What is important now is for Labour to re-assure us that they will not try and take us back in. I know Starmer has said the right things, and the manifesto mentions working with the EU (so presumanly not within it) but I'm not 100% convinced that Labout members and activists - let alone the champagne socialist wing! - are 100% on message with the party's official stance. The next election is Labour's to lose - but they could still manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory if they try hard enough!

Thought it more appropriate to reply here