Well.
There's much that could (and has) been said about yesterday's pre-Budget Report and I'm reluctant to join in a review of the details.
It's the sheer, mind-numbing scale of the borrowing that horrifies me. Labour came to power in 1997 full of optimism and confidence. Gordon Brown was not going to be like previous Labour chancellors, all tax and spend. It was he who defined a prudent level of total borrowing for the government as 40 per cent of annual GDP. But as Faisal Islam has pointed out, the UK's debts are now piled so deep that if all goes to the current Chancellor's plan - which given the Treasury's record on forecasting is unlikely - we won't get back down to that borrowing level until 2034.
Of course, many would argue that even that level was too high - and point out that the figures don't include all government liabilities (both future pension liabilities and obligations under the public finance initiative are excluded).
Imagine you are an undergraduate at an English university. If you are an average student, you will graduate with £23,000 of borrowings. You then have to find a job, set about repaying that debt, saving for the deposit on a house, wondering when you should start putting money aside for a pension and on top of that you will be faced with excess tax levels for the next 25 years while future governments struggle to repay the money this lot have borrowed.
Not a pleasing prospect. I wonder how many people at the beginning of their working lives will choose the easy way out and emigrate to a country that is not mired in debt?
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