UK government on track to overshoot borrowing target by £7 billion
![[Image: Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics.]](http://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/160219borrowingpredictionSamuelTombsPantheonMacroeconomics.png)
[Image: Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics.]
Oh, yes, that’s right – it was This Blog.
Nobody should be surprised, though. George Osborne never wanted to eradicate the national deficit. Only a fool would believe he did.
The Conservative Government needs to keep the deficit going, in order to justify its real plan – the eradication of the welfare state and the privatisation of the National Health Service.
They are helped in this ambition by the fact that they appear to have convinced enough voters in the United Kingdom that it is possible to cut your way out of an economic deficit. It isn’t.
The only way to build a budget surplus is economic growth. Osborne is going in precisely the wrong direction; instead of cutting, he should be investing.
George Osborne must borrow less than £7 billion in the final two months of the financial year in order to meet his near-term borrowing goals, in an early sign that the Government’s promise to close Britain’s deficit by 2019-20 might be running off course.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s fiscal watchdog, said at the end of last year that Osborne would have to keep borrowing to £73.5 billion in the 2015/16 financial year to be on course for an overall surplus by the end of the decade.
The Government borrowed £66.5 billion between April and January, leaving less than £7 billion of fiscal space for the final two months of the year if it is to meet the OBR’s forecast. That’s less than half the £14.8 billion borrowed in the same period last year.
Osborne has already missed his 2010 election pledge to eradicate the deficit by 2015. His chance of finishing the job by 2020 is now in doubt.
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Osborne will also breach his own cap on “welfare spending”. So much for “bear traps”.
after selling our silver ware off cheap he nows goes to put the boot in buy borrowing more hmm george been at the white stuff again hmm
“The Government borrowed £66.5 billion between April and January, leaving less than £7 billion of fiscal space for the final two months of the year if it is to meet the OBR’s forecast. That’s less than half the £14.8 billion borrowed in the same period last year.
Osborne has already missed his 2010 election pledge to eradicate the deficit by 2015. His chance of finishing the job by 2020 is now in doubt.”
In doubt? There is no doubt that Osbo will not keep his pledge, not a cat in hell’s chance even if he manages to leave 40 million of us broke and privatize the NHS, the exchequer will have zero funds and the UK will be a sinking if not sunk, ship.
And I doubt if that estimate includes GeoOsb’s determined efforts to keep so many things off the Con Gov’c books, like the ever continuing use of PFIs in the NHS, MoD, etc, which themselves cost taxpayers far more, as being funded form private/commercial sources, than if the Gov took responsibility and used their advantageous interest rates as public borrowing.
Never forget that our Dave’s sole commercial experience is in PR… as Warhol said, “Politics is nothing but hype, hype, hooray.”