[88]

Austerity is not a difficult policy to understand.

If your personal debts had grown exponentially over the past year, and your income showed no signs of exceeding your outgoings, would you not make some effort to reduce your outgoings?

[rwmj]

Ah yes, the "maxing out the country's credit card" argument. The national debt is owed in £'s, which the government can create and destroy at will, and much of it is one arm of the government owing another arm of the government. It's nothing like personal debt.

[88]

Yes of course, the UK could simply print enough money to repay all its debts and that wouldn’t have any harmful or damaging effects on its economy whatsoever…

[rwmj]

It's a good job I didn't say that then isn't it?

[88]

So what is your point? The UK cannot print its way out of its debts, so what’s the relevance?

[growse]

This analogy is asinine because countries are not people. Their finances don't work even remotely similarly.

[88]

Please enlighten me on how people and countries differ in the basic concepts of having income, outgoings, and debts

[growse]

For example, people don't tend to own their own currency. I'm sure you can think of other differences.

[88]

Does that mean the UK doesn’t have income, outgoings and debts?

[darrenf]

It's much too reductive a framing, IMO. Public sector spending is not, majorly, an "outgoing" of "the UK" in any reasonably comparable way to an individual's spend - rather, public sector money generally funds services within the UK which employ individuals who a) pay income taxes directly b) spend their income in other parts of the economy, where VAT/corporation tax/etc feed back to HMRC, and companies profit and grow.

It's really nothing like an "I've spent £5 on a beer and now that fiver is gone forever" outgoing, in scale or effect.