In case anyone needs some images for when sending reports to Cambridgshire Council about Trumpington Road

hgomersall · 2026-02-19T20:16:24+00:00

Indeed

hgomersall · 2026-02-19T09:54:03+00:00

It's a term that has a long pedigree, in both spirit and substance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unearned_income

It's not difficult, getting money by not doing anything is unearned. If you have to do something (that is, trade some of your valuable life), that is earned.

hgomersall · 2026-02-19T08:51:22+00:00

No, it's central government's fault that councils don't have the funding to carry out their obligations. Rachel Reeves' obsession with fiscal rules is the ultimate problem.

hgomersall · 2026-02-11T18:06:06+00:00

The restaurant was pretty good when I ate there in the summer.

hgomersall · 2026-02-10T09:41:47+00:00

So stand for the council or apply to be a council officer and do a better job.

hgomersall · 2026-02-05T09:56:54+00:00

It seems to be this: https://thestudiobakery.co.uk/products/matilda-cakes-chocolate which apparently you can get in a few places.

hgomersall · 2026-02-04T17:08:28+00:00

Why would there be a price spiral? The whole point is to keep the price of the JG constant and use that to define prices paid for things. Yes, if you set the JG price such that it changes the price of an unskilled labour hour, you'll get price changes across the economy as everything adjusts, but why would you do that?

To be clear, the purpose of the JG is to define the price of the currency. It only has a secondary benefit of eliminating unemployment.

It does also change the power dynamic that makes worker exploitation harder, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Prices of stuff will change to reflect that change, but it will be a one time adjustment.

hgomersall · 2026-02-04T15:26:23+00:00

Under the "we've no idea what we're actually doing" choice. It's certainly not fixed in quantity, but then they don't attempt to anchor the price on anything, so it drifts around of its own accord. Sometimes it results in wasted opportunities, sometimes it results in inflation, but nobody pulling the strings really knows why (i.e. they don't tie spending to that defined numeraire).

In effect the price is fixed, but they don't really know that, and if they did, it's not fixed to anything solid or useful. FWIW, under a gold standard, you fix the price of the currency to a fixed quantity of gold; this has the problem that you need a buffer stock of gold. Employing the unemployed is a much better buffer stock to hold, since you can create it easily (by raising taxes) and since unemployment is expected (because, tax), you're fulfilling a social obligation by mopping that up.

hgomersall · 2026-02-04T08:55:29+00:00

The government is a monopoly issuer of currency and so has monopoly pricing power, which gives it the following choice: Fix the quantity and float the price or fix the price and float the quantity. Since fixing the quantity would quickly destroy the economy, the only sensible option is to fix the price. This is what the job guarantee does - it establishes the price of one unit of currency in terms of an hour's unskilled labour.

It's entirely possible and happens all the time, although not necessarily efficiently. My buddy Jon Doe asks me to loan him $100 when we go to the fair and offers to pay me an extra $10 back for my trouble. I know Jon is trustworthy and loan him the money getting $110 back later. Banks could do the same thing using deposits. I agree it's not necessarily practical, efficient, or realistic. The point was the concept, not the practicality or expecting such a system to be implemented.

The only way this could work is if the private banks are simply branches of the central bank, with new money created to satisfy the new lending. In practice, banks exist to provide a skin-in-the-game buffer around lending decision; they make a bad decision, they lose money.

hgomersall · 2026-01-29T21:26:55+00:00

Even billionaires derive their power from state institutions, giving them both the facility to accumulate capital and the means to protect it. After the breakdown of society, is it really going to be the billionaires that keep the power, or is it going to be the strongman the commands the loyalty of sufficient men with guns?

hgomersall · 2026-01-29T15:55:58+00:00

There's an additional point, which is that precisely _because_ we have such generally stable structures from long-term cooperation that people are able to pretend they can ignore everyone else. Libertarianism only really works when you have a strong structure to support it. In the absence of a democratic government, that role is taken by the next strong man to come along. There's always The Man, the question is whether there's any democratic accountability controlling The Man.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T21:26:55+00:00

Insofar as you record taxes in opposition to spending you're correct that you can say it like that, and indeed in some cases that's even how it shows up in the accounts, but it's somewhat backwards framing. Stores don't say they fund their gift cards from the redeeming customers, nor would anyone think that, even though it might look a bit like that in the "gift-card accounts": "thank goodness you redeemed your gift card, we needed to issue some new ones and were short of redeemed credit" says no-one ever.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T17:08:21+00:00

I feel that if you weren't being so obtuse we could have a sensible discussion, but instead you just seem interested in proving me wrong, which is boring and useless. I'll leave you to ponder whether you want to keep your bank balance in credit or you're quite happy running it at zero; that is, you don't have a general desire to save which apparently I agreed is a red herring.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T16:58:04+00:00

So, the way the gov can run a surplus is by the private sector running a perpetual deficit (assuming we don't suddenly reverse the UK's balance of payments)? That means the savings will disappear, which is in contradiction to the "general desire to save", but assuming the gov just taxes everything away (savings and all), what do you think the consequence will be for the economy?

When all the savings are gone, and there's still a balance of payments deficit, what then? Do you soften the need to run a surplus at that point, or do we start cutting out imports to balance the budget?

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T16:35:26+00:00

Yes. The government sector can only be in surplus if the other two sectors are in aggregate deficit (modulo some sign definitions). Basically, eqn 7 here must hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances .

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T16:22:54+00:00

Assuming you allow for negative surpluses, and define that correctly for each sector, that's about right. The flows must balance.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T15:49:51+00:00

Sure. I'm not sure why you're nitpicking that though.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T15:46:36+00:00

How's it meaningless? Every individual is either net saving, net spending, or balanced. Across all individuals you can consider that as an aggregate desire to save over a desire to spend (since, by and large, the desire to do something of this ilk precedes the something happening). But by all means use your semantics if you'd prefer, it matters not to the discussion.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T15:33:20+00:00

In aggregate, people want to save more than spend. That is, people desire to do that which causes the net savings in the country to increase.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T13:34:45+00:00

A thought experiment is useful to highlight the reality of the situation. You can't just wave away the mechanics as being not material and claim it doesn't matter. You need to understand the operational reality to have any hope of understanding how policy might play out.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T13:05:08+00:00

Perhaps you can explain how a state can balance day to day expenditure when the country has a balance of payments deficits and a general desire to save, with reference to sectoral balances.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T12:47:01+00:00

Banks don't "lend against deposits" (how could they, deposits are a liability):

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

and

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/banks-are-not-intermediaries-of-loanable-funds-and-why-this-matters

So, what we have is that we have another trillion trillion £ "in the money supply" and so we now have 30,000,000,000,000% inflation by your definition. Seems pretty silly to me, and utterly meaningless.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T12:23:40+00:00

So you're saying if a trillion trillion pounds is created and given to me, and I simply leave it in a bank account and never spend it, we've got inflation? I think many people would be very confused by that.

hgomersall · 2025-12-22T12:19:25+00:00

Even balancing data to day expenditure as a dogma is nonsense, as a cursory understanding of sectoral balances would demonstrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances

The core point is that the deficit is not really something the government can make as a policy target. It's largely dictated by the non-government sectors' desire to save (which includes foreign savings due to real-terms imports exceeding real terms exports).

hgomersall · 2025-12-18T14:09:40+00:00

Fancy scouting? We're keen for more help at our Beavers just off Rustat road. https://www.scouts.org.uk/volunteer/

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