Brown’s latest confidence trick

One of the Brownie’s we’ve been hearing recently from the Dear Leader is that it is in some way ambitious to “halve the deficit by 2014”. It’s a Brownie because it is technically accurate, yet designed to mislead the voter. Two years ago, he forecast no deficit at all by 2014. Now he’s projecting one of 5 percent of GDP – simply mammoth – and still makes out that this is something to be proud of. It’s a confidence trick: the voter is supposed to think ‘I don’t know about the figures, but if he’s boasting about it then it must be good’. When Brown told the Economist that his deficit reduction plans were the most aggressive of any major economy, I went rushing for my spreadsheets to disprove it – but, alas, no one has collated the medium-term projections of other countries to test this against. Until now. God bless Michael Saunders at Citibank, who has published the below chart showing that even Italy (a G7 member) will have wiped out its deficit by the time Britain will – under Brown – have halved it.