When will this economic illiteracy ever stop?

Use of the absurd phrase "no magic money tree" is a red flag to anyone who understands basic economics, so why do politicians keep on using it?

Back in 2017 Theresa May managed to throw away an absolutely enormous poll lead over Jeremy Corbyn to lose her parliamentary majority in an astonishing act of hubris.

One of the most memorable moments of this slow motion Tory implosion came when Theresa May invoked the economically illiterate trope about there being "no magic money tree" as she patronisingly lectured a nurse on live TV.

It’s absurd to think the Prime Minister of the country understood neither the concept of quantitative easing nor the basic macroeconomic principle that governments create money when they spend, and prevent hyper-inflation by erasing the money that they collect in taxation.

If she did understand these economic basics, she would never have made a fool of herself by prattling on about "magic money trees" on live TV, unless of course the intention was to deceive.

Fast forward seven years, and in response to Jeremy Hunt’s budget announcement Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves went on national television and invoked the same economically illiterate trope about there being no magic money tree.

There’s absolutely no excuse for Rachel Reeves spreading economically illiterate fairy stories like this.

She worked at the Bank of England, so surely she can’t be unaware of how the Bank of England pumped up the the value of the assets of the mega-rich minority by creating £875 billion in Quantitative Easing money?

Everyone in the country saw how the Tory government magicked up tens of £billions during the coronavirus pandemic, and squandered vast amounts of it on stuff like dodgy Tory PPE schemes and Dido Harding’s Test and Trace fiasco.

People who paid attention would have noticed how the Bank of England’s asset purchases perfectly tracked the extra money the government was creating during the coronavirus pandemic too.

If the government wants to find extra money from somewhere, it can simply create it, then have the Bank of England add it to their balance sheet.

Maybe Reeves wasn’t paying any attention to the most extraordinary economic event since the global financial sector meltdown in 2008, but as Starmer’s top finance minister and a former Bank of England employee, surely she should have been, right?

It’s absolutely beyond doubt that governments have the power to create extra money when wanted, or needed. The only debate can be over how much to create, and what to spend it on.

I’m sure most people can think of better ways of spending literally tens of £billions than siphoning £billions of it off into tax havens via newly-formed "PPE supply companies" hastily cobbled together by Tory politicians, their family members, and their spivvy mates, in return for massively marked up PPE that turned out to be unusable rubbish anyway.

Pretty much anything would be better: Improvements to the rail network, high-speed broadband for all, green energy generation and home insulation, renationalisation of core infrastructure and services, a new generation of council housing … even just printing it up and handing out a cash sum to everyone in the country to spend on whatever they want would be better than letting Tory spivs funnel it into tax havens, right?

Reeves knows that any of this is possible, and that the Bank of England can just create more money to buy up the cost of actually investing in the economy, as they’ve already done before, but she doesn’t want to do any of these things because she’s as obsessed with the same discredited austerity economics as the Tories.

So she spouts the exact same "magic money tree" nonsense as Theresa May before her, while her colleagues channel David Cameron by deliberately spreading the equally deceptive trope of the "maxed out national credit card".

It’s as if the Labour right have learned absolutely nothing from either 14 years of Tory economic failure (real-terms wages are still below where they were in 2008!) or from Theresa May managing to throw away her majority from a seemingly unassailable position in 2017 by talking this kind of patronising economic rubbish.

Reeves isn’t just intent on imitating ruinous Tory austerity obsession when the country desperately needs investment in the drivers of future economic prosperity, she’s imitating the exact same economically illiterate baby talk to justify it.

And if Starmer’s Labour have to resort to economic deception like this, by spreading economically illiterate tropes to dupe the gullible, who on earth can have any faith that the agenda they’re hiding behind these deceptions is actually a good one?