Friday 28 May 2010

Missing Words Round

From an article titled Rates must be set to control inflation - Cameron:

In excerpts released in advance of the speech he was due to give later in northern England, Cameron said the economy had been heading in the wrong direction for years, was over-reliant on welfare and increasingly hostile to enterprise.

"As a country we have become indebted on an unprecedented scale. Our huge public debt is the
clearest manifestation of our economic mistakes -- the glaring warning sign overhead telling us we have taken the wrong route"...

Cameron said he believed Britain could rebalance economic power, inject new life into the private sector and move to an economy built on savings and investment rather than debt.


Click and highlight to reveal what he would have said without his Home-Owner-Ist blinkers on:

Cameron said the economy had been heading in the wrong direction for years, was over-reliant on welfare, ever rising house prices and increasingly hostile to enterprise.

"As a country we have become indebted on an unprecedented scale. Our huge public debt and our huge mortgage debt mountain, which dwarfs public sector debt [are] the clearest manifestation[s] of our economic mistakes -- the glaring warning sign overhead telling us we have taken the wrong route"...

Cameron said he believed Britain could rebalance economic power, inject new life into the private sector and move to an economy built on savings and investment rather than a debt-fuelled house-price spiral.

2 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

> economy built on savings and investment rather than a debt-

Eh? Debt is the flip side of credit.

Maybe he means investment rather than consumption.... Perhaps not. He probably doesn't have a clue.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC1, while there are grey areas, there is a difference.

'Saving' used to mean 'spreading your consumption evenly over your lifetime to maximise the marginal utility thereof, for a given level of lifetime productive capacity'.

'Borrowing' ought to mean 'Only borrowing if the future value of the additional value of your personal productive capacity as a result of that borrowing is greater than the interest you have to pay'.

In a Home-Owner-Ist context these terms have a more or less identical meaning, i.e. 'taking out the biggest mortgage you can afford and campaigning for subsidies to property values'