Let’s force British politicians to balance the budget
After the Coalition: to secure the country’s economic future, we need a new balanced budget law like Switzerland.
The overriding mission of today’s Coalition Government is the elimination of Britain’s structural deficit. At the start of the economic crisis, the UK found itself with the worst deficit in the whole of the G20, at 11 per cent of national income. This was the largest deficit we had faced in our peacetime history. Both parties of the Coalition are in agreement that George Osborne’s current strategy is the only way to ensure that Britain avoids the debt crisis we now see in the Eurozone. We have ended the debt denial of Gordon Brown, and made the early, hard decisions to win back the trust of the credit markets.
But while there is no alternative, it would equally be wrong to deny that deficit reduction is painful. Brown was simply wrong to claim that economic boom and bust had been abolished. By contrast, we should do our utmost to abolish boom and bust in government spending – such volatility of spending makes for bad government and bad investment.
Fundamentally, the financial crisis represented a crisis of responsibility. Customers put too much on the credit card. Banks took too many risks, knowing the taxpayer was there to pick up the bill when things went wrong. The government spent too much, believing that the good times would never end....
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