I would say the majority (not all) of voter, vote for selfish

Comment on Election 2010 Conservative Minority Government Good for Labour? by David.

I would say the majority (not all) of voter, vote for selfish reasons, they vote for what they think will benefit their and their families life most. Maybe we could remove the core Green vote from the selfish bracket since they think they are trying to save the planet etc… which can be seen as altruistic.

I technically don’t vote selfishly, if I did I’d seriously consider voting Tory as they are more likely to not to take my hard earned money, though seeing how the Tories ran the economy last time dragging the country as a whole down (if you can’t get it right in 18 years, there’s something wrong with your approach!!!) NOT voting Tory for me is also a selfish vote since I don’t want complete morons like George Osborne as chancellor ruining an economy I rely on to perform well so I make more money!!! So I do vote selfishly by voting Labour.

I don’t think the Conservatives understand how an economy actually works as a whole. They see an economy like a single business that if they cut costs it saves money, but they forget if they cut costs that costs jobs and whatever saving they made is partially lost to benefits and less money flowing through the economy. Basically they only look at one side of the equation.

The national minimum wage according to the Tories would cost millions of jobs, yet even during a world recession there’s more people in employment today and being paid more money now than in 1997. Having people in employment earning a reasonable amount of money is what drives our economy.

Our economy has shifted from manufacturing industries that rely on manual labor, but that was inevitable as places like China became part of the world economy. We can not compete on low labor costs in an economy like ours, we have to move towards a ‘value added’ economy where you can’t get any idiot of the street to do the job with no training.

I think most people reading this will agree an economy to some degree relies on both business and individuals spending a significant amount of the money they earn and business in particular relies on borrowing money: if everyone lived like Buddhist monks our economy would collapse! When poor people are paid more they don’t save it, they spend it on small luxuries and this helps the economy. Is it better for the economy to give 100 million poor people £1 each that will be spent the week they get it (stimulating the economy) or the same amount to 100 multi-millionaires that will put it in a bank and won’t drive the economy?

Not suggesting government should be giving money away :-), but if people don’t earn enough money to live reasonably well the economy suffers and that’s why the country is worse off under the Conservatives, they don’t get it.

If you are not that well off, think about what you would do with say £1,000 more a year. Would it go in the bank earning a measly few % interest and doing little to help the economy or would you throw it right back into the economy by buying products and services that drives our economy?

Tory governments are penny pinching misers when it comes to helping the less well off thinking very short term about the bottom line and not what extra money flowing through the economy does.

An economy thrives when people spend and stagnates when they mostly save (saving is also important): look at the credit crunch and recession, people had money but they were afraid to spend it and this made the problems worse!

It’s interesting that when comparing the recent Labour and Tory governments, growth in the economy was very similar (so the economy did about the same under both governments overall) but under Labour we’ve had massive investment in public sector services like the NHS, while under the Conservatives everything was underfunded! With how little the Tories spend on the public sector relative to Labour you’d expect the economy to grow significantly faster under a Tory government because they take less money from the wealthy which they argue will create wealth for the less well off. They forget if poor people have no money they can’t buy the products and services that drives an economy!

Anyway, I wasn’t referring to Tory voters, I was referring to Tory MPs. They tend to vote for things for selfish reasons. Conservative MPs tend to be well off and the Conservative governments puts in legislation that benefits well off people at the expense of poor people (like the planned tax break for multi-millionaires!).

David