Lord Elpers wrote:
No worse than the "more borrowing is good" trap you are falling into.
That's like ignoring the gross mistakes that got us into this mess in the first place.
You too are falling into the trap of thinking that because it was heat that got him into that mess, the burns patient should be allowed to freeze to death.
Borrowing is not the total evil that Osborne would like us to think.
Without borrowing, infrastructure, for example, simply wouldn't exist.
Brown and Darling's borrowings were well within tolerable limits until the financial crash.
Indeed, both debt and deficit were better than they had inherited from Osbornes' party ... but, as we are supposed to think, Conservatives borrowing is absolutely fine but Labour's smaller borrowing is all totally bad.
You mention gross mistakes... the gross mistakes that got us into this mess were largely those of banks and financial institutions gambling with other people's money and trading in worse-than-worthless derivatives.
The affordability of debt is usually measured as a percentage of GDP.
Osborne has overseen (not overlooked, he's quite sanguine about it) a decrease in GDP ... and an increase in debt-to-GDP ... which means that debt-to-GDP has gone from 52% to 93%.
Put simply, even balanced against the low gilt yields he has to pay, he has made the affordability of the UK debt an awful lot less affordable than it was in 2008.
There now only a fruitcake rump of economists who support his policies, even many who wrote to the papers in support of his plan in the early days have now either U-turned or say it should be slowed.
Osborne warned that the UK was in danger of losing its triple A rating, which would be "disastrous" and his measures would prevent that from happening.
Three years on, the UK has lost those triple A ratings and the IMF (yes, even the IMF !!) is saying ease off the austerity please George.
No wonder he was sniffling at Thatcher's funeral, he is Thatcherite through and through, and is continuing her political ambition of the destruction of the welfare state and marketisation of everything.
