NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

[alice wellintown]

The major cause of Belgium's slightly better performance is what it
did back before the credit crisis, that is, it reduced its enormous
debt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgische_staatsschuld.png




On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying
> them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite
> the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic
> gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically
> accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing
> 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone
> average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and
> alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and
> then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that,
> if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium
> doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it
> hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the
> other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the
> absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector
> spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing
> growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view,
> in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any
> existing government.