The Centre For Policy Studies Tries The Same Old Flannel.

The Centre For policy Studies, the right-wing think tank, have been been doing a great deal of thinking about the economy of late and have reached a startling conclusion - the way out of the recession is to cut corporation tax by 50%. On the surface this appears to have much to recommend it since retaining extra profit should encourage companies, the "wealth creators" and "risk takers," to spend money and expand their operations. It is a standard belief in the neoliberal economic thesis. Unfortunately it completely fails to take into account the structure of capitalism that has emerged over the last 30 years. Big business is not longer the province of the lone entrepeneur, the Henry Fords, Andrew Carneigies and John D.Rockefeller of yesteryear. They have been replaced by the corporate executive who is not really interested in building anything but, instead, concentrates on cutting costs - in other words jobs and other people's wages. They are not "wealth creators" but rather bean counters who, when it comes to other people, are all too often "wealth destroyers." Nor are they "risk takers" since the money they gamble with belongs to someone else and, when things go disastrously wrong, they rarely suffer but instead walk off with millions in "golden handshakes" and pension entitlements. It also fails to take account of the fact that business is cash rich at the moment as they hoard money, refuse to invest, continue to cut overheads and, if anything, become increasingly risk averse. In a way the neoliberal thesis, self-serving and economically ignorant in many ways, is also a romantic movement the looks with nostalgic eyes to a period in the late 19th when lone entrepeneurs dominated the economy - the economic equivalent of Hollywood's love of the "Wild West" genre. So, instead of real radical thinking, the Centre For policy Studies has come out again with same old tired mantra and urges tax cuts for the rich - again - ignoring completely the real engine of business expansion, the ordinary people who buy things and create demand. Keynsian economics might have been banned in the west but it hasn't in China and the comparison between the two economic systems couldn't be more stark. Think tank? They don't know the meaning of the word.