Captain Haddock wrote:'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.'
An Interesting graph but there are several ways to illustate these figures. Inflation adjusted, GDP related and economic cycle adjusted. You see for one thing, there is no problem about running up a deficit in a recession or economic slow-down
provided you balance it during the growth part of the cycle and do not have a deficit at the start of the next cyclical slowdown. Add that in to the above graph and you can see very clearly how Labour totally screwed up the economy. They start increasing spending as soon as their pledge to match Ken Clarke's spending ended in 2000 and during that long pretend growth phase, fuelled by a borrowing bubble, kept overspending so in 2007 when the good times stopped rolling we were in a terrible economic position.