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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
London, United Kingdom - A decade of "austerity" - a political programme of slashing public spending on services in a bid to reduce government budget deficits - has seen significant effects on the health and wellbeing of Britons, new research has reported.
Life expectancy has stalled and mortality rates have increased, especially for the poorest in the United Kingdom, according to a report commissioned by the Institute of Health Equity.
The report, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review Ten Years On, was launched on Tuesday and sees Sir Michael Marmot, a former president of the World Medical Association, updating his influential 2010 report, having been asked by the then-Labour government to study the question: "Is inequality making us sick?"
Marmot's latest research analysed a wealth of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Public Health England to explore what has happened since his last landmark report. And the answer can only be summarised as: Not only is inequality making us sick but it is killing us quicker.
In the past decade - for the first time in 120 years of increasing life expectancy in England - life expectancy has stalled for those people living in the UK's 10 percent most deprived areas, particularly in the northeast.
Among women from the most deprived areas - especially British women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin - life expectancy fell between 2010-2012 and again between 2016-2018.
Mortality rates have meanwhile increased for people aged between 45 and 49 - the generation that grew up under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's administrations. The report details how life expectancy follows the social gradient - the more deprived the area, the shorter the life expectancy.
Marmot's data analysis finds that, as the social gradient has become steeper, so inequalities in life expectancy have also increased.
Austerity has adversely affected the social determinants that impact on health in the short, medium and long term. Austerity will cast a long shadow over the lives of the children born and growing up under its effects
:- Professor Sir Michael Marmot
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:46PM (13 children)
Why not? The United States certainly behaves as if this was possible. The only answer is trade deficits, because Governments are not businesses nor individuals. As long as the confidence in the economy continues a government can do many things that individuals cannot including continuing to run up an infinite deficit. This breaks only as a nation needs resources that are not within the government's ability to regulate or appropriate, that is, international trade.
I don't know if I really believe that, but I found it an intriguing idea when it was posed to me in economics class some decades ago. And it does parallel an idea in private finance, also, in that as long as there are financial institutions that have confidence in lending to you your resources are only limited by your credit. (The difference being your creditors will eventually expect repayment, again, not necessarily a constraint upon Government as the can appears to be able to be always kicked down the road. Until revolution.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:57PM (6 children)
Need I point out that faith in the US government is not a universal thing? Starting with the 1976 oil embargo, more and more people have been looking for an alternative to trading in US dollars. China and Russia are leading the way, hammering out their own alternative, for Asia and beyond.
Remember, no empire lasts forever.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @05:56PM (4 children)
And roubles turned into empty paper even more times than the empire itself fell.
Some people learn from history. Other people occasionally lose all their money.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:26PM
You look to recent and current events, and claim to learn from history? How valuable are your Roman and Greek investments today? Or, how about those sticks, with notches cut into them, that predated English pounds sterling? Deustch Marks?
So, uhhhh, the US dollar has been the de facto exchange currency for ~80 years now, and you expect that to continue, because you, a short lived human, have never known anything else?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:48PM (2 children)
Greek ruled the ancient world until Roman took over
Roman rules much longer and their power disappeared and break out
Byzantine ruled much longer and was slowly losing power to the Ottomans
Ottomans ruled for a long time, in partnership with Venice in the market, but Venice economic power went to smoke when the Portuguese start the age of discoveries and took the spice market by sea. Ottoman slowly lost they power and almost nobody cared about then until they disappeared.
The Portuguese ruled half of the world and to avoid war, shared it with Spain (the other half)... until the Portuguese king died young and the Spanish also got the Portuguese crown
Spain ruled the world, but Ducht and English started to expand their power, as Spain (and Portugal) hadn't human resources to control all world.
English and Dutch raised their economic power until so many countries also started to trade and their power slowly got dissolved.
English still manage to got many of its power due to the industrial revolution, but WW1 stress then and pushed part of this power to the USA, France and Germany.
WW2 destroyed the economic and industrial power from France and Germany and English borrow so much money that never again could recover their power. (they just finally finish paying the loans a few years ago) USA and Soviets pushed their industrial production to much higher values.
Soviet power slowly faded due to bureaucratic communism and too much focus in cold war
USA power are slowly fading away due to their aggressive "profit first" target, the rise of big companies having more power than countries and the rise of cheap china industrial power
As you can see, no empire lasts forever, sooner or later internal and external problems will eat the "empire"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @02:22PM
The "Byzantines" were the Eastern Roman Empire.
Only the Western half of the Roman empire fell.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Saturday February 29 2020, @05:22PM
Maybe first read a history book before posting.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @10:26PM
So? The United States has an insurmountable stockpile of the one true currency: ammo.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)
And there is a cost, a very real, very large cost. It's called inflation. This amounts to a tax on savings. All the extra value the government gets to spend has been effectively deducted from all the saved value everyone else in society has.
We can pull heartstrings by thinking of Granny's retirement account, we can mute them by thinking of some blue chip wall-street fund; but both are hit just the same, savings is diminished across the board exactly enough to pay for your spending.
So, anyway, you're effectively taxing savings, and what happens when you tax something? Simple, you get less of it. So the more savings is taxed, the less money will be saved. And the less money is saved, the more inflation is going to be required to keep covering your deficit spending, so you have a vicious circle here. You can juggle the balls easily enough at first, but the longer you do it, the faster the balls have to keep moving, until inevitably the juggler loses it and everything comes to a crashing halt. As happened, for example, in Germany during the 1930s.
It may be attractive in the short term (which is why we have it, our politicians can only think in the short term) but long term this is just a slow disaster.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:49PM
Inflation may effectively be a tax on savings, but most government taxation revenue, for most governments, comes not from savings, but from spendings.
Income tax is collected when money moves from employer to employee.
Sales tax is collected when a person buys from a company.
Stamp duty when selling real estate.
Estate tax when capital is transferred to heirs.
All from the transfer of wealth, not from the accumulation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:06PM
* offer only valid while (R)
As soon as the Dems regain power deficits will resume being actual Satan.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 28 2020, @03:35AM (2 children)
Trade deficit, yes, but only very short term. Overspending can quickly devalue your currency to the levels where manufacturing picks back up and your export economy grows. Of course it also makes it impossible to afford anything not produced domestically, including raw materials. Also, when you devalue your currency too rapidly, people stop buying your bonds and using your currency. It's past my bedtime though, so I'm not going to go into why all that spells economic death for any nation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @03:55AM (1 child)
This is essentially correct. I'll add that devaluing the currency will probably lead to inflation. A small amount of inflation, say around 2%, is actually a good thing. Much higher inflation rates are harmful for reasons that should be obvious. Regarding the deficit spending that's been discussed in this thread, the only way it's really long-term sustainable is if the deficits are less than or equal to GDP growth. It's very unfortunate that both parties seem to have punted on any sort of austerity in the US, eliminating sequestration and dramatically raising spending levels. Rather than try to compromise on what we need to fund and make the difficult decisions, nobody had to lose on anything. We'll lose later on, though, but both parties are happy to kick that can down the road.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 02 2020, @04:16AM
On. The. Nose.
I just didn't want to go into greater detail because apparently the basics are too much for most folks to handle.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.