News from Labour Matters

Claims that PBR doubles the debt that Britain incurred winning WWI debunked

Claims from The Taxpayers’ Alliance website that the fiscal stimulus measures contained in the Pre Budget report would result in double the national debt Britain incurred from the the Great War have been debunked by Don Paskini:

“To get the figure of £255bn, the Taxpayers’ Alliance used the retail price index measure. As an economically valid comparison, this is about as useful as if they’d used a Random Number Generator or just made the number up themselves. It’s clear from the explanation above that the most useful comparison is about ‘how important this project was to the community or the country’, and hence the indicator to use is the share of GDP indicator.

And if you use the measure of GDP indicator, you find that the relative cost of the First World War, in today’s money, is £1,939bn, or nearly four times the cost of borrowing planned by the government now.”
Read the full article.