This Goes Against The Grain But...

Yesterday I had a quick trawl of the web because I wondered whether I was the only person in the country who doesn't think we should have tax cuts. I'm not, but there aren't many of us around.

I'll just qualify that briefly. To me we should only have tax cuts if we pay for it by cutting spending. David Cameron seems to think we can, but I think he's only talking about tax cuts because the government are doing the same thing. The assumption that targeted tax cuts will save unemployment benefit further down the line strikes me as highly optimistic; governments rarely, if ever, are so accurate in their fiscal analyses. In any case, Cameron's measures must increase borrowing in the short term at least, because he'd have to spend in advance of generating the expected saving.

John Redwood, for whom I have a lot of time, thinks we can afford tax cuts if we "abandon the ruinously expensive bank nationalisation policy". Gordon Brown is quite obviously not going to do that, so it's a slightly false argument.

Any analysis I've heard from the Left appears to say that it doesn't matter if we have to borrow more to pay for tax cuts because we're so much in debt anyway a little bit more won't make much difference - i.e. we're so far up the creek it doesn't really matter if we've got a paddle or not. What little financial discipline this government had left has been tossed away as they adopt short-termist measures to get us out of the horrendous hole their tax and spend policies have pushed us all into. I've given up asking myself "When will the bastards learn ?" because I don't think they ever will.

Interestingly (for me at any rate) it seems to be libertarians whose voices are raised against tax cuts. Old Holburn "gets it", and as the Broadsheet Rag puts it, today's unfunded tax cut is tomorrow's tax increase. I really really do not want to think about what's going to happen in a year's time, when even this government recognises that we have to start paying properly for the disaster we're currently facing. Tax higher under Labour ? We ain't seen nothing yet.