Obama vs Cameron

Last night’s question time had a bit of a US election theme and Conservative MP, Kwasi Kwarteng couldn’t resist taking a stab at Obama for not pursuing a policy of austerity. Because Obama hadn’t gone for austerity like we had in the UK, the US economy was now in a mess etc. etc.

It’s an all too familiar noise from the government but is it actually true?

Here’s a graph showing how the US and UK economies have grown over the past four years:

US vs UK GDP (2008Q3 = 100)

(The green diamond is when Obama came to power and the purple diamond is when Cameron came to power.)

It’s fairly clear from that graph that the US economy has far out-performed the UK economy in the last few years. If you compare just the time since David Cameron came to power things look even worse:

US vs UK GDP (2010Q3 = 100)

If the performance of the US economy is a failure then I would love some of their failure over here.

It makes me wonder why politicians say things like this. Why, as an austerity pursuing government, would you even bother bringing up this subject when talking about the United States? Of course they still have problems but it’s an economy who didn’t pursue full out austerity and who massively out-performed our own who did.

One possibility is that when politicians say things like this they just hope none of us will check the actual facts and find out they’re telling lies. Worrying as that possibility is, I think the reality is even more scary:

This government is so far down the road of austerity that the truth just isn’t important any more.

RedEaredRabbit