Fiscal responsibility is both fair and progressive. Governments that lose control of their public finances are the most unfair and unprogressive. In recent decades, this is a lesson which has been learnt across the world, by politicians of both the right and of the left.
In the US it was Bill Clinton and the New Democrats who made the case for balanced budgets and deficit control in the early 1990s. And during an economic recovery they eliminated the budget deficit and pushed ahead with deeply controversial welfare reform.
In Canada, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin took the necessary steps to bring their exploding deficit under control.
Or there is Goran Persson, the Swedish Social Democrat Prime Minister, who turned a 9% budget deficit into a 4% budget surplus.
In UK, it was James Callaghan who argued that you could not spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending.
It was Roy Jenkins who warned that governments could not keep pushing up public expenditure and maintain the values of a plural society with adequate freedom of choice.
And it was that former Treasury Minister in the last government, Paul Myners, who reminded us again this week how he believes that there is nothing progressive about a Government who consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation.
Basil Venitis notes UK's national debt is a staggering 90,000 pounds ($133,000) per household. HRH PM David Cameron, descendant of King William IV, leader of Tories, has already announced more than six billion pounds in budget cuts. Cameron plans to raise the retirement age under his Social Security system and abolish payments to parents of newborn children. Cameron also aims to implement a work requirement for those receiving benefits.
I repeat these observations because I reject entirely the false choice that some in the present political debate seek to establish between being responsible, and being progressive or fair. Successful centre-left parties root themselves in a progressive belief that governments must live within their means, or the poorest suffer. Those that do not - and find themselves arguing for investment over cuts - lose their way.
Of course, the choices made within a fiscal consolidation should also seek to be fair ones. I believe the choices in the Budget, choices that included an increase in capital gains tax for higher-rate taxpayers and a new bank levy, were fair choices. I believe the choices on public spending that we have already made, and that shape the entire spending review, are also fair ones.
We are protecting the National Health Service - which so many millions of families depend on - from real cuts. That is a conscious choice. Our opponents object to it. They would cut the NHS. We are also honouring - almost alone in the world - our commitments to raise the international aid budget to 0.7% of our national income. Helping the world's poorest is a conscious choice, which some oppose. Both, I believe, are fundamentally fair choices.
But so too is our drive to reform welfare and provide a pupil premium for the most disadvantaged children - for fairness is about equality of opportunity too. And fairness extends across the generations, for what is fair about forcing the next generation to pay for the debts of our generation? We are all in this together. And the spending review we will produce in one month will show that.
Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, points out kleptocrats are creating zombie banks and companies that are kept alive artificially. We started with a too-big-to-fail problem, and part of the policy response to the crisis has been even more financial consolidation. JP Morgan took over Bear Stearns and Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch. What we have now is financial institutions that are even bigger. Those institutions, even more then before, know if they do something very risky, something reckless, they will be bailed out again.
Corpfare is corporate welfare, such as subsidies, bailouts, and monopolies, granted by government to davajides, pimps of kleptocrats. Corpfare is like steroids, it may look attractive in the short run, but it cripples you in the long run! Corpfare destroys the level playing field that free markets depend on, creates a corrupt relationship between government authority and special interests, transforms corps to corpses, and is unconstitutional. Even loans by government-sponsored entities constitute another form of subsidy. Zombiecorps, zombie corporations, badly in need of structural reform, but kept alive by state subsidies, badly hamper growth. Venitis figures that at least four trillion euros are wasted on corpfare worldwide every year.
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