It won’t be for a while yet, but the UK seems headed for another financial crisis. And this time, the government won’t be able to blame the banks. The blame will lie squarely on our own determination to vote ourselves generous healthcare, welfare and pension benefits in the hope that our children will calmly pick up the bill.
This giant welfare-state Ponzi scheme is bound to collapse sometime – though you can be pretty sure that the politicians running it won’t end up in the slammer alongside Bernie Madoff. An ageing population means that all those benefits we vote ourselves today will be simply unaffordable tomorrow. You believe the national debt will top out at 100 percent of GDP? Add in these hidden commitments, and you discover the debt is already many times that.
In the Adam Smith Institute report, On
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