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Comment by tlocke | Hacker News Reader

I'm from the UK and I'm broadly in favour of Osbourne's policy. We've run up a huge debt that resulted from the government spending more than it was receiving in tax revenue, for many years. Particularly bad were the years when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister (when he was Chancellor he did pretty well).

Now the UK government is cutting public spending, and a lot of public sector jobs have been lost. However, in that time the private sector has created more jobs than have been lost by the public sector, so employment is high, much higher than in the US.

It took us many years to get into this mess and it'll take many more to get us out, but Osbourne is on the right track.

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So basically we're going to repair the damage by effectively choking our economy by reducing spending everywhere? Fantastic.

I am from the UK and knowing many public sector workers, disabled people, women, people searching for jobs, and working class, I wholeheartedly think George Osbourne can go fuck himself. Ain't it weird that the supporters of his monstrous plan are those who are not affected by it in the least?

The interest payments on UK debt is £43bn. That money is going to bankers at the moment, but it should be going to the people. Sooner or later we've got to pay down the debt. The longer we leave it, the more the poor will suffer. Look at Greece, it's far worse to be in poverty in Greece than the UK, and that's where we're heading if we don't take action now.

And so how is strangling the economy, creating unemployment and destroying our future helping to pay for our debt?

The public sector got too big in the UK, and the wealth-creating private sector too small. Osbourne is re-balancing the economy by scaling back the public sector back a bit, and allowing the private sector to grow to increase prosperity. I'm not arguing against the public sector, it just has to shrink a bit.

"when he was Chancellor he did pretty well"

Most of the economic mess in the UK (particularly inflated public sector salaries) was done on his watch as Chancellor.

It stuns me that the Tories have managed to convince so many people that the debt is all down to Labour and not the reckless profligacy of the banks. The vast majority of the debt was run up ensuring that the entire banking system in the UK didn't collapse taking the saving of hard-working British people with it. Virtually nothing has been done by the Tory-LibDem coallition to prevent this from happening again.

The government bailed the banks out using taxpayer's money, which added to our national debt. It happened to be a Labour government, but the Tories would have done the same. The banks should have been allowed to fail, just like any other business.

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