FIRST it was the finance secretary who said that if the government borrowed less then more savings would be available for the private sector to borrow. Then it was the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India who talked of government borrowing “crowding out” private borrowing. The common theme here is that there is a given amount of savings, a fixed pool as it were, from which if the government takes more, then less will be available for the private sector.

MUCH has been written by now exposing the fraudulence of the government’s claims of a “historic” rise in the minimum support price for kharif crops. It has been pointed out for instance that while the Swaminathan Committee had recommended that the MSP should be fixed at 50 percent above the cost of production C₂ which includes rental on own land, a recommendation that the BJP  in its 2014 election manifesto had promised to implement, the current MSP still falls way below that level.

SOCIALISM has collapsed over large tracts of the globe. Where it still exists, the economic regimes have undergone considerable reforms. Not surprisingly therefore the old socialist regimes are objects of much vilification these days. While capitalism, understandably, has a vested interest in promoting such vilification, the Left opponents of capitalism continue to remain too shell-shocked to counter it.

DONALD Trump’s leaving the G-7 summit without budging an iota on protectionism is indicative of the disunity among the leading capitalist countries on the strategy to overcome the capitalist crisis. Trump has decided that the US would go its own way, by enlarging the fiscal deficit, not just for giving tax concessions to the corporates, which would have little demand-stimulating effect anyway, but also for increasing government expenditure which would have this effect, and at the same time by protecting the domestic market.

THE Modi government is celebrating four years in office with great fanfare. The fact that these four years have unleashed an unparallelled process of social and political retrogression in the country is well-known and need not detain us here. Our purpose here is to examine what these years have meant for the living standards of the bulk of the Indian people.