If taking note of the IFS report published yesterday, please also remember this. 1. The IFS, while notionally independent, is largely funded by Westminster. 2. It’s a right-wing organisation that wants Corporation Tax abolished and replaced by higher VAT – in other words, a massive transfer of taxation from companies to ordinary people, particularly the poor who are disproportionately affected by VAT. 3. It pretty much always thinks massive cuts in public spending are needed. 4. Like all economists, the IFS is great at analysing events of the past, and abysmal at predicting the future. Not one economic “think-tank” predicted the global banking crash of 2007-08. The history of economics (“the dismal science”) is a decades-long track record of relentless unbroken failure. A monkey throwing hedgehogs at a dartboard would be right more often than economists are. 5. Even by the standards of economists, attempting to predict anything 50 years into the future is insane to the point of ridiculousness. It’s like someone in 1963 accurately forecasting the economic situation today. Which would be impressive, considering that North Sea oil hadn’t even been discovered in 1963. There were barely computers in 1963, so it’d have been even more impressive if they’d somehow foreseen that the UK would almost completely destroy all of its manufacturing industries and put all its eggs into the basket of incomprehensible computerised jiggery-pokery called “financial services”, a business based on naked robbery and lying about abstract conceptual “products” somehow related to piles of mostly-imaginary money. 6. The IFS’s calculations assumed an independent Scotland would pursue the same tax and spending plans that the UK does now. We don’t think it’s going too far to say that the entire point of independence is NOT to do that. 7. Every single aspect of the report is based on unknowns, all piled on top of one huge fundamental unknown – the outcome of the negotiations for independence after a Yes vote. Nobody knows what share of UK debt an independent Scotland would take on, and therefore what its economic starting position would be. Heck, we’re constantly (albeit entirely falsely) told by the No camp that we don’t even know what currency it would use. So the idea that anyone could reliably assess the country’s budget is comical. Link : wingsoverscotland/contractual-obligation/
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 20:58:56 +0000
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