Dear George Osborne.....

[Flatpackhamster]

The main thing that has no basis in reality is the banks and accountants deciding that the resession was over and the economy everywhere was getting itself out of trouble.

All I hear on the news about the economy is how the figures show that it has been saved, then in trouble, then saved... this ontinuous cycle of BS is the really disconnected point of view. Unfourtunatly these people that sit about with their calculator trying to decide if they have made up enough money for that day or not are the ones running things. In their world the global economy seems to go from saved to in trouble three or more times a day. With this kind of insanely short term thinking at the top of the chain is it any wonder that things are still a mess.

Absolutely. There were ongoing, systemic problems and the short-termist attitude of the politicians was "We can spend our way out of this and everything will return to normal." Sorry, but it won't. We have a decade or more of zero-growth while we start to pay off our debts. Then we can return to an expanding economy - if we deal with the debt and the welfarism and entitlement culture and so on. But we have a huge mess to deal with and it was very foolish (IMO) for the coalition to pretend everything was going to be fine. It smacks of an intellectual poverty that one would hope that a government as well-educated as this wouldn't be suffering from.

[localzuk]

Absolutely. There were ongoing, systemic problems and the short-termist attitude of the politicians was "We can spend our way out of this and everything will return to normal." Sorry, but it won't. We have a decade or more of zero-growth while we start to pay off our debts. Then we can return to an expanding economy - if we deal with the debt and the welfarism and entitlement culture and so on. But we have a huge mess to deal with and it was very foolish (IMO) for the coalition to pretend everything was going to be fine. It smacks of an intellectual poverty that one would hope that a government as well-educated as this wouldn't be suffering from.

Pretending its all fine does a few things:

1. Increases confidence in the stock market
2. Increases consumer confidence, and therefore spending
3. Gets people to vote for them