The post you are reporting:
The cuts have to be made, but as yet they have not really bitten and even the full range of cuts are less than were imposed by Callaghan after the IMF stepped in. People shout about them before they actually happen.
If you overspend, as the government has been doing since 2001, you have to cut it, there is no other option and it is a cruel deceit for any politician to suggest otherwise. Always it is the big budget items that have to be hit, like welfare, to make the necessary changes.
Neither can you bridge the gap through higher taxes, simply because tax revenues will fall and it would seriously damage growth prospects extracting money from the real economy and reducing spending power, economic growth has to be the larger part of the equation. Only the private sector can get us out of the mess because only they create new income for the treasury and the country, public spending just re-cycles money inefficiently. Right now the domestic economies growth prospects are damaged by what is happening in our major markets making a difficult situation even worse.
We have a difficult balancing act to get things moving but one thing is certain, spending more, increasing the deficit and adding to borrowing will only make a bad situation worse and will increase the level of cuts when they inevitably have to happen. It would certainly lead to higher interest rates that we all have to pay including the government, increasing further the deficit and damaging economic growth - a unholy cycle that many families will be familiar with when credit cards get out of control.
