The Austerity Myth

Federal Spending Up 5% This Year

By JOHN MERLINE,

When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending, and in April they succeeded in passing a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011's budget. Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut an additional $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

Some analysts have blamed these spending cuts for this year's economic slowdown.

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there haven't been any spending cuts at all.

Higher Spending, Deficits

In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That's an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher.

These spending hikes haven't stopped many analysts from claiming that the country is in an age of budget austerity, one that's hurting economic growth.

A July article in USA Today, for example, claimed that "Already in 2011, softer government spending has sapped growth."

Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden, wrote over the summer that "government spending cutbacks have been a large drag on growth in recent quarters and have led to sharp losses in state and local employment."

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued in September that "the turn toward austerity (is) a major factor in our growth slowdown."

If government spending is related to growth, as these and others claim, then the economy presumably should be growing faster, not slower, given the current higher rates of federal outlays.

State Spending Higher Too

Nor does the claim that state governments sharply cut spending stand up well to closer scrutiny.

Overall state spending continued to climb right through the recession, when all money from state general funds and other funds, federal grants and state bonds is combined.

Total state outlays in 2010 were almost 10% higher than in 2008, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers' annual State Expenditure Report.

And general fund spending — which makes up about 40% of total state spending — is expected to climb 5.2% in 2011 and 2.6% next year, according to the association's latest survey.

NASBO says that states were able to sustain spending growth through 2010 only because the federal government was pumping more money in via the $830 billion stimulus, and that these funds are now all but exhausted.

As the survey report notes, the tapering off of the stimulus "combined with a slow recovery in state revenue collections, will continue the tight resource environment for states in fiscal 2012."

Meanwhile, the claim that state and local government jobs have been severely cut is, at the very least, open to some debate.

"We know that the biggest problem that we've had in terms of unemployment over the last several months has not been in the private sector," President Obama said at a recent press briefing. "It's actually been layoffs of teachers and cops and firefighters."

Monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics do show that from December 2007 — when the recession officially started — until the end of 2010, state and local governments shed 221,000 jobs. And they've cut another 234,000 jobs so far this year.

But a separate annual survey from the Census Bureau shows that "full-time-equivalent" state and local employment climbed 200,000 between 2007 and 2010 (the latest year for which these census data are available.) The differences come from the methodologies used.

In any case, even using BLS data, the number of state and local government jobs has fallen just 2.3% since December 2007. That compares with a decline of 5.4% for private-sector jobs.

It's not about green, it's not about energy, it's all about religion

Say no to wind farms: Shale of the century

By MATT RIDLEY

The arguments for wind farms just became obsolete. We’re entering an era when gas will be cheap, plentiful – and green

Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air? The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5 megawatts (working at about 25 per cent capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50 per cent efficiency) in its first ten years.

Difficult choice? Let’s make it easier. The gas well can be hidden in a hollow, behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on top of hills, because that is where the wind blows, visible for up to 40 miles. And they require the construction of new pylons marching to the towns; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

Unpersuaded? Wind turbines slice thousands of birds of prey in half every year, including white-tailed eagles in Norway, golden eagles in California, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania. There’s a video on YouTube of one winging a griffon vulture in Crete. According to a study in Pennsylvania, a wind farm with eight turbines would kill about 200 bats a year. The pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.

Still can’t make up your mind? The wind farm requires eight tonnes of an element called neodymium, which is produced only in Inner Mongolia, by boiling ores in acid leaving lakes of radioactive tailings so toxic that no creature goes near them.

Not convinced? The gas well requires no subsidy — in fact it pays a hefty tax to the government — whereas the wind turbines each cost you a substantial add-on to your electricity bill, part of which goes to the rich landowner whose land they stand on. Wind power costs three times as much as gas-fired power. Make that nine times if the wind farm is offshore. And that’s assuming the cost of decommissioning the wind farm is left to your children — few will last 25 years.

Decided yet? I forgot to mention something. If you choose the gas well, that’s it, you can have it. If you choose the farm, you are going to need the gas well too. That’s because when the wind does not blow you will need a back-up power station running on something more reliable. But the bloke who builds gas power stations is not happy to build one that only operates when the wind drops, so he’s now demanding a subsidy, too.

What’s that you say? Gas is running out? Have you not heard the news? It’s not. Until five years ago, gas was the fuel everybody thought would run out first, before oil and coal. America was getting so worried even Alan Greenspan told it to start building gas import terminals, which it did. They are now being mothballed, or turned into export terminals.

A chap called George Mitchell turned the gas industry on its head. Using just the right combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – both well-established technologies — he worked out how to get gas out of shale, where most of it is, rather than just out of (conventional) porous rocks, where it sometimes pools. The Barnett shale in Texas, where Mitchell worked, turned into one of the biggest gas reserves in America. Then the Haynesville shale in Louisiana dwarfed it. The Marcellus shale mainly in Pennsylvania then trumped that with a barely believable 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, as big as any oil field ever found, on the doorstep of the biggest market in the world.

The International Energy Agency reckons there is a quarter of a millennium’s worth of cheap shale gas in the world. A company called Cuadrilla drilled a hole in Blackpool, hoping to find a few trillion cubic feet of gas. Last month it announced 200 trillion cubic feet, nearly half the size of the giant Marcellus field. That’s enough to keep the entire British economy going for many decades. And it’s just the first field to have been drilled.

The impact of shale gas in America is already huge. Gas prices have decoupled from oil prices and are half what they are in Europe. Chemical companies, which use gas as a feedstock, are rushing back from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities are converting their bus fleets to gas. Coal projects are being shelved; nuclear ones abandoned.

Rural Pennsylvania is being transformed by the royalties that shale gas pays (Lancashire take note). Drive around the hills near Pittsburgh and you see new fences, repainted barns and — in the local towns — thriving car dealerships and upmarket shops. The one thing you barely see is gas rigs. The one I visited was hidden in a hollow in the woods, invisible till I came round the last corner, where a flock of wild turkeys was crossing the road. Drilling rigs are on site for about five weeks, fracking trucks a few weeks after that, and when they are gone all that is left is a ‘Christmas tree’ wellhead and a few small storage tanks.

Jesse Ausubel is a soft-spoken academic ecologist at Rockefeller University in New York, not given to hyperbole. So when I asked him about the future of gas, I was surprised by the strength of his reply. ‘It’s unstoppable,’ he says simply. Gas, he says, will be the world’s dominant fuel for most of the next century. Coal and renewables will have to give way, while oil is used mainly for transport. Even nuclear may have to wait in the wings.

And he is not even talking mainly about shale gas. He reckons a still bigger story is waiting to be told about offshore gas from the so-called cold seeps around the continental margins. Israel has made a huge find and is planning a pipeline to Greece, to the irritation of the Turks. The Brazilians are striking rich. The Gulf of Guinea is hot. Even our own Rockall Bank looks promising. Ausubel thinks that much of this gas is not even ‘fossil’ fuel, but ancient methane from the universe that was trapped deep in the earth’s rocks — like the methane that forms lakes on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

The best thing about cheap gas is who it annoys. The Russians and the Iranians hate it because they thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades. The greens hate it because it destroys their argument that fossil fuels are going to get more and more costly until even wind and solar power are competitive. The nuclear industry ditto. The coal industry will be a big loser (incidentally, as somebody who gets some income from coal, I declare that writing this article is against my vested ­interest).

Little wonder a furious attempt to blacken shale gas’s reputation is under way, driven by an unlikely alliance of big green, big coal, big nuclear and big gas providers. The environmental objections to shale gas are almost comically fabricated or exaggerated. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses 99.86 per cent water and sand, the rest being a dilute solution of a few chemicals of the kind you find beneath your kitchen sink.

State regulators in Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming have all asserted in writing that there have been no verified or documented cases of groundwater contamination as a result of hydraulic fracking. Those flaming taps in the film Gasland were literally nothing to do with shale gas drilling and the film-maker knew it before he wrote the script. The claim that gas production generates more greenhouse gases than coal is based on mistaken assumptions about gas leakage rates and cherry-picked time horizons for computing greenhouse impact.

Like Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungle decades after the war was over, our political masters have apparently not heard the news. David Cameron and Chris Huhne are still insisting that the future belongs to renewables. They are still signing contracts on your behalf guaranteeing huge incomes to landowners and power companies, and guaranteeing thereby the destruction of landscapes and jobs. The government’s ‘green’ subsidies are costing the average small business £250,000 a year. That’s ten jobs a firm. Making energy cheap is — as the industrial revolution proved — the quickest way to create jobs; making it expensive is the quickest way to lose them.

Not only are renewables far more expensive, intermittent and resource-depleting (their demand for steel and concrete is gigantic) than gas; they are also hugely more damaging to the environment, because they are so land-hungry. Wind kills birds and spoils landscapes; solar paves deserts; tidal wipes out the ecosystems of migratory birds; biofuel starves the poor and devastates the rainforest; hydro interrupts fish migration. Next time you hear somebody call these ‘clean’ energy, don’t let him get away with it.

Wind cannot even help cut carbon emissions, because it needs carbon back-up, which is wastefully inefficient when powering up or down (nuclear cannot be turned on and off so fast). Even Germany and Denmark have failed to cut their carbon emissions by installing vast quantities of wind.

Yet switching to gas would hasten decarbonisation. In a combined cycle, turbine gas converts to electricity with higher efficiency than other fossil fuels. And when you burn gas, you oxidise four hydrogen atoms for every carbon atom. That’s a better ratio than oil, much better than coal and much, much better than wood. Ausubel calculates that, thanks to gas, we will accelerate a relentless shift from carbon to hydrogen as the source of our energy without touching renewables.

To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidised renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available, is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.

The power of capital accumulation

Which Country Is No. 1 In Manufacturing? 

By Jeff Harding, 

This chart from Forbes (via Big Picture) breaks some common myths held about America’s manufacturing power (“We don’t make anything anymore”). What you see in the charts is the application of capital in an economy. Our workers are three times more productive than Chinese workers.

It’s interesting that if you look at long-term employment trends in the U.S., aside from recessions, it has stayed rather steady as a percentage of the population for a long time. Which goes to show that while employment in manufacturing is declining, new jobs are created elsewhere. And, lest you believe that those service jobs pay less than manufacturing jobs, that is simply not true: on the average they are almost identical ($44,000 p/a).

The American moment

Crisis of Decadence 

 A society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance for only so long.

By mark Steyn

When the think-tank chappies ponder “decline,” they tend to see it in geopolitical terms. Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion. If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported last month that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed to the ground in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their “International Religious Freedom Report.” It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, “international”: For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of the country’s economy. American taxpayers have spent the best part of half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it. In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.

As America sinks into a multi-trillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.

As I said, these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what the Council on Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant. In Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health, and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven for concluding that, if this is “decline,” bring it on.

But it’s not going to be like that for the United States: Unlike Europe, geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand. Indeed, they’re already underway. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented preeminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything and we would still be Number One. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.

Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” — because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve.

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on the “We are the 99%” websites have real problems. However, the “Occupy” movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protestors are as mired in America’s post-war moment as their grandparents: One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in “environmental restoration.” Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.

Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for “American Autumn” think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And in that sense this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flatlined, the college fees soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and Obamacare is already making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn’t leave much else — although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college “education” and health “benefits.” For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by ever grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes, and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide, far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale.

It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.

EU ready to sink the Greeks and protect everyone else

EU Said to Consider 50% Greek Writedown

By James G. Neuger - Oct 14, 2011

European officials are considering writedowns of as much as 50 percent on Greek bonds, a backstop for banks and continued central bank bond purchases as key planks in a revamped strategy to combat the debt crisis, people familiar with the discussions said.

The Greek bond losses may be accompanied by a pledge to rule out debt restructurings in other countries that received bailouts, such as Portugal, to persuade investors that Europe has mastered the crisis, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations will run for another week.

In the works is a five-point plan foreseeing a solution for Greece, bolstering of the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund, fresh capital for banks, a new push to boost competitiveness and consideration of European treaty amendments to tighten economic management.

Political, technical and legal constraints cloud the crisis-resolution strategy, due to be hammered out at an emergency Oct. 23 euro-area summit in Brussels under mounting pressure from markets and politicians around the world.

“The current problems of the euro zone have all the elements of a classical tragedy: a brave and exciting hero launches into the world, but is marred by fatal flaws,” David Beim, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York, said in an e-mailed research paper. “Only radical action could save the common currency.”

French Bonds Slump

The crisis raged today through France, the 17-nation euro area’s second-largest economy and co-anchor with Germany of the European Union. French bonds slumped, pushing the 10-year yield up 17 basis points to 3.13 percent. The week’s rise of 38 basis points was the most since the euro’s debut in 1999.

European officials will discuss the evolving strategy at this weekend’s Group of 20 meeting in Paris with global financial leaders including U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has criticized Europe for indecisiveness. While Europe is weighing a “much more forceful package,” Geithner said on CNBC today that “the hard part is still ahead.”

The strategy hinges on putting Greece on a viable path, as two years of austerity plunge it deeper into recession and provoke civil unrest that threatens political stability. Greece forecasts its debt to reach 172 percent of gross domestic product in 2012 as the economy shrinks for a fifth year.

Options include tweaking a July accord struck with investors for a 21 percent net-present-value reduction in Greek debt holdings. One variant would take that reduction up to 50 percent, the people said.

Debt Exchanges

Under a more aggressive proposal, investors would exchange Greek bonds for new debt at a lower face value collateralized by the euro-area’s AAA rated rescue fund, the people said. The ultimate option is a restructuring involving writedowns without collateral, they said.

The constraint is how to cut Greece’s debt without leading rating companies to declare the country in default. Such a “credit event” triggered by a forced restructuring could unleash a cascade of losses through markets.

“Now is not the time for speculation, now is the time for action,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters today in Paris.

The bank-aid model under discussion is to set up a European-level backstop capitalized by the 440 billion-euro ($609 billion) EFSF rescue fund, the people said. It would have the power to take direct equity stakes in banks and provide guarantees on bank liabilities.

Such ideas are controversial in Germany, Europe’s dominant economy, which so far has called for bank recapitalization on a country-by-country basis.

Capital Level

French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said on Europe 1 radio today that it may be “good” to force banks to maintain a 9 percent capital buffer to absorb sovereign risks, up from the 5 percent core capital level used in July’s stress tests.

Officials are considering seven ways of getting more firepower out of the temporary rescue fund. The options break down into two broad categories: enabling it to borrow from the European Central Bank or using it to provide bond insurance.

The ECB has all but ruled out the first method, making bond insurance more likely, the people said. EFSF guarantees of new bonds sold by distressed euro-area governments might range from 20 percent to 30 percent, a person familiar with those deliberations said.

‘Leverage Effects’

“We must optimize the efficiency by leverage effects,” European Commission President Jose Barroso said today in Saint- Cyr-sur-Loire, France.

Recourse to bond insurance suggests the central bank will need to maintain its secondary-market purchases for an unspecified “interim” period, the people said. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet, whose eight-year term ends Oct. 31, has expressed reluctance to maintain the policy.

The Frankfurt-based ECB has bought 163 billion euros of bonds, overriding opposition from Germans on its policy council. The purchases started with Greece, Ireland and Portugal and widened to Italy and Spain in August as those markets came under attack.

A consensus is also emerging to accelerate the setup of a permanent aid fund planned for July 2013, the European Stability Mechanism. Next week’s discussions will focus on creating it a year earlier, in July 2012, and easing unanimity rules that permit solitary countries to block bailouts.

One proposal is to enable aid to proceed when backed by countries representing 95 percent of the fund’s capital on the basis of an assessment by the EU and ECB, the people said. Another proposal would set an 85 percent threshold.

Dodging Politics

Revisions to the voting rules would prevent local politics in smaller countries from stopping measures deemed necessary by Germany andFrance. Slovakia, for example, stayed out of Greece’s first aid package. Finland spent three months negotiating a tailor-made collateral arrangement as its price for contributing to the next one.

Greece’s plight and dwindling investor confidence in the bonds of Italy, the world’s fourth-largest debtor, have triggered a reconsideration of bondholder loss-sharing provisions as part of the permanent fund, the people said.

Germany was the main driver behind the provisions for “private sector involvement.” The July accord on a second Greek bailout threw that into question by declaring Greece’s case “exceptional and unique.”

A leading opponent of further bondholder losses is Ireland, aiming to return to market financing by the end of 2012 after receiving 67.5 billion euros in aid last year.

It is “perfectly clear” that bondholder burden-sharing “is an issue of concern not only to Ireland but to other countries,” Irish Prime MinisterEnda Kenny said in Brussels yesterday.

Child abusers

The children's football league which only lists scores as 1-0 or 1-1 'to avoid humiliation after heavy defeats'

All results recorded as 1-0, 1-1 or 0-0 as league refuses to record thrashings

By Claire Ellicott

A junior football league has stopped publishing the results of its matches in case the scores embarrass the young players.

Telford Junior League – made up of 20 divisions ranging from under-10s to under-16s – now records all games as either 1-0 wins or 1-1 draws.

Bosses at the league have defended the decision to withhold the number of goals scored which they claim will spare the youngsters the humiliation of losing badly.

Barmy: The Telford Junior Leagues have stopped publishing the true results and record all scores as either 1-0, 1-1 or 0-0 to avoid embarrassing young players

But campaigners and parents say the policy teaches children that competition is a bad thing and risks creating a generation of bad losers.

Unrepentant league bosses have defended the policy, saying it is in line with Football Association guidelines, which the FA disputes.

The FA says it has no rules relating to results above the age of eight.

And the league, which was founded in 1984 and has more than 2,000 players from clubs in Telford, north Shropshire and Bridgnorth, will also stop recording results for under-11 teams altogether from next season.

One parent, who did not want to be named, said: ‘This is because they don’t want kids embarrassed if their team has lost heavily.

‘If that’s the case what’s the point of having a league table up on the website at all?’

Another parent, who also did not want to be named for fear of turning officials against his son’s team, said: ‘I think it’s crazy - kids need to learn about winning and losing from an early age. They aren’t recognising the boys’ achievements. 

‘They might not want to embarrass the losing team but if one of the lads scores six or seven goals and that isn’t recorded what kind of message does that send to them?

‘The lads might as well not turn up.’

Assistant secretary Stephen Groome said the league had introduced the results policy on its official website this year.

'Still 1-0... despite 7 goals': The Telford League have stopped recording thrashings - and will get rid of all scores from next season for under-11s (file photo)

He said: ‘Shropshire FA have said it is a guideline and we chose to go with it. If someone else wins, the children do not need to be embarrassed.

‘There are mixed feelings about it and it’s up to each league. From next season under-11s won’t even have their results recorded.’

He said goal difference did not play a part in determining final league positions and teams finishing on equal points would share their position.

‘Sometimes there is a 16-1 or 16-0 goal difference but it’s not a determining factor in junior football because the league will be shared,’ he added.

Stephen Clarke, manager of the under-11s Wrekin Panthers team, backed the move.

He said: ‘The children’s welfare is paramount. The winners have three points on the website if they win and the children who lose 20-0 would feel very disheartened if it was on the website.

‘They might think of not playing. I think it’s a very good idea.’

But Mr Clarke added there must come a point when players had to accept defeat.

He said: ‘I think probably by the age of 15 then they have an understanding that life is a bit of a competition and we are competing with other people.’

Dame Kelly Holmes, the double Olympic champion, has spoken out in the past about the decline of competitive sports for children.

She said it risked spawning a generation of bad losers and blamed a culture of political correctness for making ‘competitiveness’ a dirty word.

A spokesman for the FA commented: 'There’s an FA rule that prohibits the publishing of results and league tables across all media for U7 and U8 age-groups where the focus of the game is about learning to play without the pressure of full-time scores. 

'For older age groups, there are no rules or FA guidelines which indicate that the final score should be changed.'