TimeToChange

I see what you see and hear what you hear. The British and American governments are, like their many colleague governments, doing their best to lead the recovery of our economies.

The holes that our banks have helped to dig are so deep and the damage so immense that just this problem will take a long time and a great deal of luck to fix. But the problems are bigger than this; we’re facing a raft of financial and economic woes that have deeper roots than the immediate recession.

The most important of these is not the lack of consumer spending; much more serious are the balance of trade deficit, the lack of manufacturing in our key strategic industries, the growing foreign control of our power and energy sources, in fact overseas ownership of our countries.

We need immediate encouragement for our people to save for the future, to curb their long term spending on consumer rubbish and focus on our real needs, such as building pension values and investments. Governments and individuals should be encouraged to live within their means.

We must find ways to keep people in their homes and to generate movement in the property market. In the UK this could easily be helped by reducing the taxes and increasing the incentives, even on a temporary basis this would help.

Perhaps one of the most pressing issues that must be unraveled is the sheer size of the public spending in the UK as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product. This has been growing in this country and elsewhere at an alarming rate and will continue to do so for the immediate future as this is one of the areas of the economy that governments feel might be successfully pump primed as a means of resuscitating the flat lining economy.

The fact is that the government is mortgaging our future as a rescue package for our present and this will linger like a bad smell, possibly for generations. Perhaps we need to swallow hard and take the awful medicine now rather than have to swallow poison later. We should seek solutions that might be less immediately palatable but provide long term and effective solutions. The voters will swing behind whichever politicians generate genuine answers rather than silly quick fixes that we will have to pay for in the long term.