AYABONGA CAWE: Aggressive debt reduction is like fixing deck chairs on the Mendi
Treasury’s evidence on the effect of spending needs to be interrogated when underemployment is an existential threat
Nearly a fifth of the 16.4-million South Africans who were employed in the first quarter had joined the ranks of the unemployed by the end of the first month of lockdown. This reality — more than depressed asset values, foreign debt, equity sell-offs and inflation — is our most pressing concern.
Capacity utilisation is depressed as employers lay off and furlough workers in the middle of an anxious winter, coinciding as it does with the peak of the coronavirus. In the middle of such depressed demand conditions and supply-side constraints, it is suggested that stimulus spending has no multiplier impact, that in some cases the impact is less than the rand invested. But this assertion, underscored by contested and discredited “evidence”, is foundationally unsound. ..
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