Well, that's everything sorted then, aye?
'Leaders at the G20 summit in Canada have agreed to cut national budget deficits without stunting economic growth.'
In other news, Our New Coalition Overlords have agreed targets to release unicorns into the wild, the USA has announced that it can't stop the oil gushing out but the oil won't pollute anything, and the Saudis have announced that women will walk around in bikinis whilst obeying sharia law.
OK, I might be exaggerating but- seriously- do any of these morons have any idea of how they are going to achieve any of this?
After all, Our New Coalition OverlordsTM, for instance, have announced savage cash cuts of precisely naff all.
'So the cuts are going to be long and deep, which nobody can deny.'
Well, nobody that is, except extremely naive people who simply look at the government's spending projections. People like John Redwood, who at the TPA's budget briefing today, drew attention to the plain fact that under the Osborne plan, total public spending is not facing any cut at all. In fact, it is projected to increase from £697bn this year to £758bn in 2015-16, a rise of 9%.
So, when anyone talks of these "savage cuts", I can but utter a hollow laugh. Because, in truth, this government is going to carry on spending more and more of our money, and racking up more and more debt.
The simple fact is that there are no cuts; the government has simply said that they will increase the rate at which they spend our money by a smaller amount than the previous government wanted to. And the other simple fact is that the government is still overspending by far more than £100 billion per annum.
So, according to this BBC story, the G13 governments have agreed to "halve their deficits within three years" but- given that they seem unwilling or unable to sack hundreds of thousands of pointless bureaucrats and to cut hundreds of millions of pounds worth of pointless projects- our own government is not going to achieve anything like that.
Unless, of course, they massively increase taxes.
Of course, our government is already spending about 50% of the entire economic output of the country and so, if they raise taxes, you can be damn sure that they will increase the 'stunting [of] economic growth'.
So, you'll excuse me for thinking that this pointless posturing (at our expense) is going to achieve precisely nothing, apart from making our leaders feel that they have "arrived" on the world stage...
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