Posted on 08/16/2025 2:08:40 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Taxes will be going up, but whose?
Rachel Reeves, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, stands at the precipice of a fiscal catastrophe, with a £50 billion shortfall in public finances threatening to upend her economic strategy.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a think tank co-founded by John Maynard Keynes, has issued a damning indictment of the Government’s economic strategy: a toxic brew of sluggish economic growth, a faltering jobs market, and spiraling welfare costs has plunged the government’s coffers deeper into the red. At a time when debt interest payments exceed £111 billion ($147 billion), the situation is increasingly unsustainable.
To restore just £9.9 billion of fiscal headroom and meet her self-imposed “iron-clad” fiscal rules, Reeves must conjure £51.1 billion through either tax hikes or spending cuts—a sum equivalent to a 5% increase in both basic (20%) and higher (40%) income tax rates.
This is not merely a budgetary hiccup; it is a profound failure of governance that imperils Britain’s economic stability and the well-being of its citizens. The UK’s generous (indeed, too generous—as President of France Emmanuel Macron recently pointed out) welfare state is dependent on a thriving economy. Yet for too long, Britain has traveled down the dark path of excessive government spending and anti-entrepreneurialism.
The irony is palpable. Just a year ago, Reeves excoriated the Conservatives for leaving behind a £22 billion black hole after 14 years in power, defending her own £40 billion tax raid as a “once in a generation” remedy to stabilize public finances.
Yet that raid has clearly proven inadequate. Business confidence has plummeted, unemployment is rising, and inflation is creeping upward. NIESR predicts that Reeves will overshoot her borrowing targets by £41.2 billion, a shortfall that dwarfs the...
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
FTA: “...a £50 billion shortfall in public finances threatening to upend her economic strategy.”
So spending more than you take in is a ‘strategy’? Who knew?
I know. They should send more Billion to the Ukraine and maybe they will win and the UK can win the rare earth spoils this whole thing has been about from the beginning with.
So less than half of the amount we threw away on Ukraine is a fiscal crisis? That’s pocket change to the big spenders over here.
Hotel rooms for north Africans don’t exactly grown on trees.
Pikers.
Only Fifty Billion ?
Pikers indeed (and wankers)..
“Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, stands at the precipice of a fiscal catastrophe, with a £50 billion shortfall”
50 billion?? That’s pocket change compared to what we’re short every year.
We’d be happy with 4 times that.
Interesting, since politicians who want to spend more than the government takes in always invoke Keynes as support.
Like all homos, John Meynard Keynes lived for the moment and didn't give a fig about the future, as reflected in his economic theory.
In times such as this, one has to raise a grim smile when a socialist NGO, The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, raises a red flag to the economic course of its own socialist government.
£50 bil is what they’re admitting to...
But I’ll bet every country in Western Europe is cooking its books.
And that the cut-off of laundered American taxpayer money has left their welfare states ready to implode.
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