GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC POLICY

That this House notes the comments by Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman that the Government's plan for the economy `boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction' and `appears to come straight from the desk of Andrew Mellon, the US Treasury Secretary, who told President Hoover to fight the Great Depression by liquidating the farmers, liquidating the workers and driving down wages'; further notes Krugman's observations that the Government is using the financial crisis of 2008 as cover for advancing an ideological programme for downsizing the welfare stateand that its plan has been sold to the public with an unprecedented and unwarranted degree of fear-mongering; and calls on the Government to abandon its programme of cuts and seek instead to use public investment to generate jobs, avoiding a double-dip recession and thus securing a reduction in the public deficit as tax revenues rise and unemployment falls.