As a child my mum read my brother and I the story
of the tortoise and the hare. We all know the story, the fast hare
was challenged to a race by the slow tortoise and yet despite the
hares immense advantage his overconfidence is his downfall and he
loses the race.
Everyone looks at Aesop's famous fable as allegory
for working hard and not being too over confident - I look at it as
the perfect way to explain why Austerity as a policy is working.
Austerity may not be the prettiest policy. Cutting
spending rarely is. To quote Mrs T though pennies
do not come from Heaven. When we spend more than we have they
must come from somewhere here on Earth and it is both arrogant and
overconfident to believe that we will always be able to afford to
find them.
Moreover we have enjoyed a period of near constant
growth since 2010. In fact the only dip we have seen coincided with a
similar dip in the German
economy (well known for it's fiscal prudence) and the rest of
Europe
and Central Asia. Since then we have since seen consistently
higher growth then our European cousins. In fact we have seen almost
double the annual GDP growth of the European Average. This is
despite claims that the Government is cutting spending "too
far and too fast"
At the same time the UK Government has been
accused of being too slow at building the economy. People have
complained that growth has been the slowest
since records began. But this takes me straight back to Aesop's
fable:
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