ILLUSTRATION BY IAN
The problem of how to pay for the war arose, as Keynes wrote, because war is inflationary. War brings a massive increase in incomes relative to supply available for civilians. The pandemic is deflationary: it forced massive cuts in spending and mass unemployment. Whatever you may hear from your Chancellor on Budget day, therefore, the problem is not “how to pay for the pandemic.” It is how to restore the economy on just and sustainable terms.
That task includes getting to grips with the vast inequalities, instability, precarity, disillusion and despair of the entire neoliberal epoch, now savagely aggravated by death and disease. Poverty, hunger and homelessness are one face of inequality. The grotesque gains of the billionaire class are another. The issue is: what to do?