Just as with Phil Woolas’s immigration claim, there are a whole load of question marks hovering around Alistair Darling’s revelation that the Government will boost public spending to help support the economy. The biggest of them is simply: will it work? And, to be honest, there’s no set answer to that. Only time will tell. It is ominous, though, that Keynesian injections of cash didn’t do much to help Japan a decade ago.
But then there are the particulars. Darling claims that the money will be taken out of future Budgets, but paid for by extra borrowing now. Will this mean a significant reduction in future spending projections? Can we really trust the Government to pay back this increased debt with money that it earmarked for spending in 2010, 2011 or whenever? Or will this place – as I suspect – an even greater burden on the shoulders of future taxpayers?
Darling says there’ll be more details about this “reprioritising” in the forthcoming Pre-Budget Report.
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