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Video: British Cities are Going Bankrupt

🕑 Added 2024-05-17 15:00:15 +0000 UTC

Comments

Tom Nicholas

I really enjoy lots of Gary's stuff! Haven't seen this one yet but will check it out!

Helge Rausch

You should talk to Gary Stevenson about this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8bt95a5TS4

Tom Nicholas

The UK's growth over the past 15 years has been massively aided by these kinds of brutal austerity programmes. At a time of historically-low interest rates, when the government could have been borrowing money essentially for free and investing it in upgrading infrastructure (both physical and educational, social etc.), they've instead cut, cut, cut in a way which just depresses growth. And, as I caveat in the video, the Preston Model as not a complete solution. But, there's a massive leap from building a shopping centre to "playing Venture Capitalist". There's certainly some risk in investing in such a development; but a town-centre shopping centre is hardly an unknown quantity. I'd say there's much more risk in the approach many other cities have taken of selling-off large chunks of city centres to private companies—the end product of that is a massive loss of democratic control over city centres.

Ian Godsey

Really enjoyed the video. The idea of not letting different areas set up their own tax policies based on the will of the voters is kind of wild to me as an American. I have lived in Colorado and California with one being an extremely low-tax state and the other being a high-tax state because that is what the voters of the two different areas want, there is no "right" or "wrong" state when it comes to the level of taxation. The cuts of funds being transferred to local governments are brutal but your conclusion is that they choose to do this because they are dogmatic in their beliefs of conservatism? It has nothing to do with Britain's anemic growth for the last 15 years? There is just less tax revenue to allocate while expenses such as the NHS are growing faster than the tax base is. Also, your upbeat ending seems like a guaranteed boondoggle. A local government playing Venture Capitalist rarely ends well. Wouldn't the government have been better off minimizing their risk by using the same money to help start new businesses or existing ones expand with loan guarantees or other less risky investments and lets the free market and customers choose what type of businesses are in their downtown? Also, I know garbage services are not a true competitive market but more akin to a public utility even if it is privatized but the idea that all of this money is leaving the local economy when zero jobs can be outsourced is a terrible argument. Like if shareholders are making that much profit from the trash company the government is doing a shit job at negotiating rates or they should take the money they spent on the movie theater and put it into shares in the trash company and use the profits to pay for repairing potholes.