Tag: Debt

15 he sat in his car in a quiet country lane

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He was twenty thousand pounds
in debt. Payday loans;
one thousand per cent interest.
His children told their grandmother
Santa hadn’t come the year before.
A single dad, he quit his job in a factory to look after his children, but fell behind with rent
and with trying to feed and clothe them.
He had four pounds sixty one pence
in his account, waiting for the benefit;
there is an average five-week wait for the first payment.
He had been served an eviction notice.
He sat in his car in a quiet country lane,
crying.

[Metro, 21/07/2019, Dad, 34, took his own life after wait for Universal Credit left him with £4.61; Daily Mirror, 20/07/2019, Single dad with just £4.61 took own life after waiting weeks for Universal Credit]

61 reasons for the necessity

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Britain in the last decade
wasn’t so much a lie
as a mistake.
When the Chancellor was giving
reasons for the necessity
of austerity
he relied heavily
on recent findings
by two Harvard economists.
They had
‘shown’
via a model built using
44 countries over
two centuries
that
when a government’s ratio of debt to GDP went over 90 per cent,
the economy shrank.
The Chancellor
drew directly on this research:
‘The latest research suggests
that once debt reaches
more than
about
90 per cent of GDP
the risk of a
large
negative
impact
on long-term growth becomes
highly significant.’
Cuts were planned.
A graduate student at Amherst College,
Thomas Herndon,
was set to check the Harvard numbers,
as a homework assignment.
He tried to replicate the findings
but couldn’t.
So he asked them for the original data,
which they (admirably)
sent.
Herndon checked the numbers
and found a mistake.
The economists
had intended to sum twenty
rows of data
but had only used fifteen.
When all twenty were included
countries with debt to GDP ratios over 90 per cent
were no longer shrinking.
But by this point
the government simply couldn’t back down.

[London Review of Books, 21/09/2023, ‘Get a rabbit’]