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How Did the Fiscal Squeeze Game Change Over Time?

While all of the squeezes explored in this book involved loss imposition of some kind to increase revenue or rein in spending, we noted two changes over time from our analysis in Chapter Two, namely an apparent move away from revenue-led squeezes in the final third of the period, and an apparent move from more emphasis on 'short sharp' squeezes (the 'surgery without anaesthetics' approach) in the early part of the period to more long-drawn out 'boiling frogs'-type squeezes in the final three episodes. But as we also noted, those episodes included individual years of hard squeeze sandwiched within longer periods of soft squeeze.

Looking more qualitatively at each of the squeeze episodes over the past eight chapters, other accompanying changes over time are noticeable. One, relating to 'blame politics', is the apparent (and in some ways curious) absence of delegation strategies for fiscal squeeze since the 1930s. A second relates to changing triggers for fiscal squeeze over time, and a third consists of changes in the way the spending and revenue game was played over the hundred years considered here.

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Setting the Scene. The Politics of Austerity and Fiscal Squeeze
Since the 2008 financial crash, 'austerity' has been one of the top two or three issues dominating both practice and analysis of politics and economics in much of the world. Like most highly charged political terms, 'austerity' is rarely defined precisely and means different things to different people....
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
What Is Fiscal Squeeze and Why does It Matter?
By fiscal squeeze we mean a type of 'austerity' policy that takes the form of substantial effort and activity by governments to impose absolute or relative losses on at least some people by increasing revenue, restraining spending, or a mixture of the two. The word 'substantial' is there to signify some...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
Three Key Political Choices in Fiscal Squeeze and Their Consequences
As mentioned earlier, this book focuses particularly on three key political choices bound up with fiscal squeeze, namely the choice of tax hikes as against spending cuts, the choice of whether to deliver the pain in short sharp shocks or in a more gradual and long drawn-out way, and the choice of how...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
Observing and Classifying Fiscal Squeezes
As we noted at the outset, 'austerity' in the sense of restraints imposed on consumption can take different forms, and the focus here is primarily on austerity in the sense of fiscal squeeze, namely pressures to increase tax revenue or reduce public spending. But as has also been noted, the effect of...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
UK Fiscal Squeezes over a Century. A Summary Comparison
Working mainly from historical financial outcome statistics, this short chapter aims to do two main things. First, it reports and compares the main episodes of fiscal squeeze—in terms of major revenue increases, spending cuts, or both—identifiable from such statistics in the UK between 1900 and the...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
Fiscal Squeezes Identified and Compared
As explained in Chapter One, we conceive of fiscal squeeze as concerted effort by politicians and governments to impose losses on some individuals or groups by cuts in public spending and/or increases in state revenue to correct the public finances. In that chapter we distinguished that approach to 'austerity'...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
The Varying Spending/Taxation Composition of Fiscal Squeezes
Table 2.1 shows the different mixture of revenue and spending that went into the squeezes we have identified. Of the eighteen cases shown in column 2, ten were 'single' squeezes—seven revenue-only squeezes, three expenditure-only squeezes (the two interwar cases, plus the late-1970s Labour squeezes)—while...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
Triggers, Accompanying Conditions, and Composition of Fiscal Squeezes
The second set of questions raised at the outset of this chapter concerns what we can say from reported economic and financial statistics about what triggered fiscal squeezes or what the accompanying conditions were, and what categories of spending or taxation were most affected by those squeezes. The...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)
The Implications of a Changing Public Spending Profile for Fiscal Squeeze
One noticeable variation over time in spending squeezes is reflected in the sixth column of Table 2.3, which shows an appreciable fall in the proportion of spending cuts accounted for by reductions in public sector investment in spending squeezes since the 1970s (when such spending cuts accounted for...
(A Century of Fiscal Squeeze Politics : 100 Years of Austerity, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Britain)