Cuts - good or bad?

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Here is my comment on an article by union leader Mark Serwotka, who earned the wrath of the commenters at Cif.

I don't know whether the comments here represent Guardian readers, Daily Mail readers or just Tory voters who have nowhere better to go. Mark Serwotka is one of the most articulate and effective union leaders in the country. But clearly he has his work cut out!

Some cuts are inevitable, but there is a political and economic point here that all these brutalist cut it to the bone commenters fail to see. How did you decide that public sector job = wasteful, and private sector job = useful? Is a housing officer obviously less useful than a banker or a management consultant? Just because a company exists and makes money does not make its activities necessarily useful to society. I would have thought that the crisis of the last 3 years shows that capitalist business chases the money. If I am a banker and I make £1 million a year by deals which may actually damage other companies or individuals, and I spend a third of that on frivolous nonsense provided by service companies, will the transfer of that £1m into 'useless' public sector jobs decrease or increase social welfare? Oh sorry, I forgot, all that matters is how much tax I pay, who cares about society?

If the size of the public sector debt is inverse proportion to the proper allocation of resources in the economy, then presumably Equatorial Guinea is the most virtuous economy on the planet, because,as the CIA table shows, it has so little public debt and presumably an extremely small (efficient?) public sector. If debt gets out of control, we end up as Zimbabwe. But simply cutting debt is not a panacea - it depends what kind of society you are trying to create. Nearly all the countries with very low debt to GDP ratios are poor (NIgeria, Cameroon anyone?). Of the indebted ones, half are rich. So debt levels tell you nothing about social development, other than countries with very low debt levels are all poor unless they have oil!

All these commentators are suffering from an outbreak of ideological fury based on decades of propaganda against public sector and assertions about waste that ignore what massive cuts in public sector jobs will do to the social infrastructure. The answer is massive poverty and the creation of urban wastelands of the sort you find in US inner cities. Be careful, you may get what you wish for.