There are good and bad arguments in favour of the fiscal compact. Well, better and worse anyway. But one stands out as being truly, shockingly, jaw-droppingly appalling: We should vote Yes because it will improve our credit rating. As if Standard and Poor and Moody and Mean don’t have enough influence.
It’s probably quite true of course; being a nice obedient populace is something they give bonus points for, no doubt. But it makes me think, why stop at voting? There’s loads more we could do to make ourselves look better credit-wise.
- Stop holding those nasty unpredictable votes altogether. A country run by committee – especially a committee of appointed, imported technocrats – will be far more predictable than any democracy. Markets like that.
- Execute the old. Seriously, think what that would save. And others who are a burden on the public finances too, like the mentally and the physically disabled. Or to use the more acceptable modern term, the economically disabled.
- As is universally acknowledged, lenders only want to lend to you when you don’t actually need the money. Therefore we should repudiate all our debts. Including of course debts the government owes to citizens, such as pension and welfare commitments.
I only scratch the surface here I’m sure. There’s no end to what we could borrow, as long as we forget why.
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- Time for banks to gang up on rating agencies (blogs.reuters.com)
2 replies on “Reasons To Vote Yes”
A Yes could be good for our credit rating, and I’m thinking that malnutrition will do wonders for the childhood obesity epidemic. Win-win.
It’s hilarious whenever I get notices in the mail about a debt I owe on, and how it will negatively impact my credit rating if I don’t pay it alI, and pay it right now. I don’t feel the need to check my credit score unless for some reason somebody needs to know the actual number, but I know it’s pretty low. (I have an anxiety disorder; I can come up with plenty of things to needlessly stress out about without needing to research them, thank you very much.) All those threats about the damage to my credit rating aren’t going to magic me up the money I need to pay the debts, and it’s hard to tank a credit rating that can’t get any lower. Declaring bankruptcy would only be an improvement.
(And I can’t declare bankruptcy, because I took out student loans, and they won’t let you default on those until you’ve been out of school for a few years, and it hasn’t been long enough for me, yet.)
Credit agencies have done a good job of making people care about their credit ratings. If you can’t pay your debts, though, who gives a shit what grade they assign you? Why accept draconian measures to raise that grade from a shitty one to a slightly less shitty one?