Or the relationship to other OECD countries can be used, in political terms, as a reason not to reduce government debt, or the budget deficit, regardless of the potential danger, should economic conditions deteriorate again. Relative terms can be used differently by both sides of politics, depending on which way you want to look at them. On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Lev Lafayette <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:
On Thu, November 6, 2014 8:29 pm, Michael Scott wrote:
Interesting that YOUR opinion is that of "the majority", Russell. I think you'll probably find that about 50% of the population probably think that government debt is "large".
I have no doubt that sort of number is true. They'd be wrong, but they still think it.
Relative to the way it was left by the coalition government, debt is rather large. Given the various claims of interest payments (increases in debt by interest accruing) I think you could probably say the debt is "large".
Relative to what was left, that would be right; an increase of -3.8% of GDP in 2007-2008 to 13.0% for 2014-15.
But that's still an incredibly low figure relative to other OECD countries, and a low figure historically.
The argument that we have a large government debt, in political terms, is a flag raised for cuts to government services.
-- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
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