Growth based on cheap money

The chancellor will claim he's pulling off the well-known royal baby effect if, as expected, growth figures improve on Thursday. Prince Charles's birth in 1948 came as Britain entered a quarter-century of recovery, Prince William's heralded green shoots in 1982. Can Prince No-Name-Yet do it again?

The short answer is no. To hit what George Osborne originally promised his austerity would achieve, GDP has to rise by an impossible 5.3% in each of the next two years. Whose growth is it anyway? The great majority will see no improvement in living standards, with wages still falling behind inflation, year after year. And what kind of growth? Instead of his promised rebalancing, the bartender in the Treasury brings the down-and-out alcoholic a bottle of the rot-gut feelgood that put us all in the gutter in the first place. No productivity, no manufacturing, no exports, no investment but instead cheap money, zombie banks primed with quantitative easing who still won't lend, unsustainably low interest rates – and now Help to Buy to pump up house prices.

Homeowners may feel better by the election, able to remortgage and spend again – and what else matters? But we are back on the bottle big-time. Savings are falling, investment is down by a quarter since the crash and 158 countries invest more than Britain. Foreign investment into Britain has been good – but that's put at risk by Conservative euro-madness: as the Engineering Employers Federation said, it relies on access to EU markets.

So is this the time to spend ￡12bn on urging people to buy with a 5% deposit, not even restricted to first-time buyers, on properties up to ￡600,000? True, neither prices nor quantity of sales have reached pre-crash levels – but that's a dangerous benchmark. It's rare to see such a phalanx of loyal Tory-supporters, such as the Institute of Directors, throwing their hands in the air in horror as happened after Osborne's Help to Buy launch on Tuesday. By 2017 the scheme is supposed to end – but as with the Lawson-induced house-price bubble, how do you take the bottle away without another collapse, his critics asked?

Although home owning is falling, down to 64% of the population in 2011, property prices remain our national addiction: just count the number of stories a week gleefully predicting rises. Osborne is betting that homeowners will bring home the electoral bacon. But people now know apparent growth based on cheap money and artificial mortgages is fool's gold. Here is Labour's chance to be the wiser party, ready to sober up the real time Location system.

House prices are highly sensitive to government words and actions. Labour should say loudly and firmly that it will do everything in its power to freeze prices. Language and firm intent can chill expectations. Lay out a policy whose stated aim is to house people well and restore homes as a commodity like any other, not a one-way bet to wealth. Plan to build at least a million homes, instruct and enable local authorities and housing associations to build and force developers to use their hoarded land or sell it on. Freeze rents so they rise by no more than annual inflation to stop property being used as investment, redirecting that money productively. Warn that if prices still rise, from now on capital gains tax may be imposed on homes to chill the market. Do whatever it takes, and say so loudly.

Labour will borrow to invest outside the current spending straitjacket it has accepted for year one, that investment sum to be announced nearer the election. Why not describe that as the national mortgage, the nation borrowing to build massively to invest in the future generation, just as households do? A national mortgage to build would contrast well with Help to Buy inflating existing stock into new bubble prices.

The federal government may be one step closer to keeping tabs on consumers’ health care information with a new data hub compiling personal information from a host of government agencies and newly collected health status information.Some experts warn it could get even more invasive over time.The Data Services Hub will be the primary computer program to verify eligibility for Obamacare exchanges. But the program will collect and compile such massive amounts of information that lawmakers and experts are increasingly fearful of privacy infringement.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan warned The Daily Caller News Foundation that the program is a “massive data grab” and will put citizens’ private information at risk.But the program, which has been receiving heat over the large amount of personal data it will connect from various government sources, will also add health status to the mix — an addition Meehan finds distrubing

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Marilyn Tavenner, whose department will oversee the Hub, told lawmakers last week that the limited health information required will be relevant to the type of coverage they receive under Obamacare exchanges.

The government’s problem lies in an Obamacare requirement for a certain level of coverage for a certain price, creating “huge incentives for insurers to avoid the sick,” Cannon explained. “Insurers have to provide coverage to customers for $10,000 when the person uses $100,000 in medical care.”One attempt to alleviate price fixing problems is CMS’s Risk Adjustment Program, which would give subsidies to insurance companies with the sickest patients. But Cannon argues that this system will inherently lead to more government snooping.

“Well, how do they know which insurance companies have the sickest patients? The only way they can do that and keep costs under control is to delve into the illnesses that people have and the treatments they’re receiving to verify if these people are actually sick,” Cannon told TheDCNF. The adjustment will require more federal intrusion in the health of the masses.

And the Data Services Hub could be the means to that end. The hub is already set to collect what it calls “limited” personal health information, pertaining only to pregnancy status, blindness, and disability status.On top of these disclosures, Meehan warned that more and more information could be wrangled out of consumers. “When CMS articulates what they’re asking for now, they say ‘including but not limited to’ in all the descriptions,” the congressman told TheDCNF, leaving a window open to adding more federal agencies to the sharing program or increasing the amount of health information to be included in the Hub.

Cannon warns, “There’s a built-in need in Obamacare for the federal government to have more and more access to people’s medical information.” With such pressures on federal regulators it seems unlikely that the data sharing program, which two experts alleged in USA Today will be the “largest consolidation of personal information in the history of the republic,” will be limited to just three categories of health information.

Along with the federal government’s collection of ever-increasing amounts of personal health data comes increased security risks. Meehan told TheDCNF he is unsatisfied with CMS’s cyber security protocols, after his questioning during a House hearing last week forced Tavenner to admit she’d never attended an FBI or Department of Homeland Security briefing on preventing cyber attacks against the data hub.

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