The Groan: still in touch with reality

Someone at the Guardian — Nick Watt? it appears under his name — needs a lesson in thinking.

Redwood said: "The deficit reduction plan was the wrong way round. It was rear-end loaded instead of front-end loaded. When you do these things you have to do the reductions, or the freeze, up front. They decided to have the easy year the first year. The longer you leave it the more difficult it is, because the more it is your problem rather than an inherited problem."

Redwood's view is echoed by David Ruffley, a Conservative member of the Commons Treasury select committee, who served as a special adviser when Clarke was chancellor. "The chancellor should seriously consider having a new spending review to bring forward cuts due for later in this parliament to this year. We need tax cuts to increase aggregate demand and to get the economy moving." (src)

John Redwood says the Government should have cut faster and harder. I'm inclined to agree, for similar reasons to his: a government can get a lot done in its first year or two; it will get a lot less done in its last year or two. But it's the last year or two in which this Government hopes to get most of its deficit-reduction done. This is poor strategic planning. It's also poor financial management, since every year the deficit runs, interest payments rise and it gets financially harder to close the gap.

Ruffley, on the other hand, has not. He has been calling for unfunded tax cuts. I heard him on the radio yesterday saying, in terms, that the Chancellor should let the deficit widen in order to cut taxes. He was quoted in the Guardian itself only last week with a variation on the same theme, declaring that the markets wouldn't 'go haywire' over a looser borrowing stance from the Treasury. He thinks that the Government should be borrowing more to pay for a decrease in taxes.

So we have Redwood saying decrease the deficit through cutting spending and Ruffley saying increase the deficit through cutting taxes. And we have someone at the Guardian who cannot tell the difference.