Your six-point guide to the Green Budget

As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re so minded — as they’re very good summaries of some complicated fiscal areas. Anyway, here are my points:

1) The scary graph.
As it does every year, the IFS has produced what I call the ‘scary graph’. It shows what our debt/GDP ratio would look like for decades hence under various circumstances. Even extending Osborne’s plans, debt will only fall back to its pre-crash levels around 2030:

And they also produced a variant of the scary graph, showing what might happen when certain considerations around an ageing population (which I’ve blogged before) are taken into account.