Review of the 2011 Jersey budget
Historical Archive
This article is preserved as part of the historical record of this blog. It reflects the author's views at the time of publication. The content has not been substantively altered, although the HTML, accessibility and formatting have been updated to meet modern web standards.
We were told Jersey would be saved from economic catastrophe if the government straightened the Avenue. The first stimulus worked, apparently, and all we needed to bring back prosperity was more government stimulus.
Stimulus might appear to work for some people for a short time. For a while they could pretend to be engaged in productive activities that would help the economy. Employment might temporarily rise, but these were not long-term jobs, the capital spent did not remain in Jersey, nor did the wages of those employed.
The government is a terrible venture capitalist.
The charade cost Jersey millions of pounds that it could not afford, yet there was no mea culpa. No one questioned the calculations or how they could have been so wrong in the wake of the previous stimulus programme.
Instead, the answer was simply to ask for more money. Once again the argument was that more spending and higher taxes would create more jobs.
You could visit the Avenue and see jobs, but what you could not see were long-term productive jobs because they were never created. Real venture capitalists make investment decisions based upon economic assessments of risk and reward rather than political considerations and publicity.
They do not simply throw other people's money around and expect prosperity to follow.
Lower government reserves led to higher taxes. Combined with an increasingly burdensome regulatory environment, these policies added further obstacles to private-sector job creation.
It has been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In my view, government had become dominated by people who sincerely believed that more spending, more regulation and more programmes were the solution to every problem. Government was their hammer, and citizens increasingly felt like the nails.
This government-centric mindset, I argued, was itself the problem. Rather than creating lasting prosperity, it encouraged dependence upon government while overlooking the productive private economy.
Jersey should instead focus upon creating genuine, long-term productive employment that allows families to build lasting prosperity, rather than temporary make-work projects funded by taxpayers.
Historical Archive Update
This page was updated on 27 July 2026. The content has been preserved as originally published. This update was undertaken solely to modernise the HTML markup, improve accessibility, correct obvious spelling mistakes and grammatical slips, update obsolete links where appropriate, and bring the page into line with current web standards.
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