Were these cuts worth the grief, both political and human, that they really are causing? The government can say they’re doing ad hoc stuff, like shipping ventilators to India in extremis; but it doesn’t plug the gap we’ve opened. If you’re a 40% taxpayer, you may not feel rich, but you are richer than 87% of the population. Surely you could afford to give 0.7% of your income to charity? And whether we feel it or not, we’re a rich country. That 0.2% by which we’ve reduced our aid budget might not seem much to us, but it’s a lot of money to lots of other people in lots of poor countries.
“Cut interest rates to prevent recession, says Institute of Economic Affairs’ SMPC”
The ‘lag’, ‘trailing leg’ or ‘long wake’ of any economic measure means that its effects are often felt long after the problem it was supposed to solve has disappeared. 2010’s ‘balancing the books within the space of one parliament’ (that went well, didn’t it?), austerity to you and me, is one example.
