Darling, can you pass the Budget?
22nd Apr 2009 09:14:49
Let's all remind ourselves that it's getting on for mid-2009, and Darling had predicted (at one point) that we'd be recovering from the economic recession by now. Presumably his calculator was broken, although everybody else's wasn't.
The bill for bailing out the banks will reach £60 billion according to our Chancellor, so God knows what the real figure will be, if he hasn't replaced his broken calculator. There's a new 45% rate of tax being paid by those earning over £150,000, and some green stuff there if you look hard enough.
But the big one is the Chancellor's own prediction of how far the economy will contract this year. He HAD expected it to fall by about 1%, which would be very bad, but was clearly a massive bigup lie miscalculation. He now thinks we may be seeing a fall in the order of 3.5%. If this is the case, and let's face it, it probably will be, it will be the biggest peacetime collapse of the economy in a hundred years.
Everything else is fairly overshadowed. The useless plank is offering us up to £2,000 to scrap perfectly working old cars and buy new ones, which isn't exactly the greenest idea in the world.
In short, the economy is massively screwed, the coffers are bare, but your old car is now worth slightly more. Of course, the people who are driving old wrecks are hardly going to have the money to purchase a new car now, but this point appears to have been glossed over. Oh, and the VAT rate is going back up.
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