Once more into the breach, dear friends! WSJ:
The U.K. government would have to pay £70 billion ($101.33 billion) in interest on its debt by 2015 if it doesn’t take urgent action to cut borrowing, Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday.
Speaking at the Open University in Milton Keynes, Mr. Cameron said the new government’s examination of the public sector’s financial position had revealed that “the scale of the problem is even worse than we thought.”
Mr. Cameron said interest payments by 2015 would he higher than the education, transport and climate-change budgets combined, and almost twice the annual revenues from taxes on company profits.
“That is how serious this problem is,” the prime minister said. “This is how far we’ve been living beyond our means.”
While Mr. Cameron risks alarming investors by highlighting the scale of the U.K.’s debt problem, he is convinced that only by confronting British voters with the harsh truth of the nation’s financial problems can he win support for the tough spending cuts that are to come.
“This is fraught with danger. This is a very, very difficult thing we are trying to do,” he said. But he added that the government “must take the whole country with us.”
Good luck with all that, guy.
Because somehow I suspect that famed Brit stiff upper lip has been softened by years of nannystate drool wiping — and all you should expect, now that the piper is demanding payment, is the shrieks of petulant children about how “unfair” it is to take away from them all the free stuff you’ve been handing out on your way to catastrophic national debt.
On the plus side, though, at least you’ve taken away their guns. So you’ve got that going for you.
Which, you listening, Obamamites…?
(h/t TerryH)
Responsible spending; it’s all the rage.
Problem is they could reduce national
pilfering, graft, and wastespending to zero and we’d be eaten alive by interest debt. And crashing markets.Irony abounds. Get the hook in deep enough and you have to rip out a jaw dislodging it.
My four-year-old gave the obvious answer: Everybody should have all the money they want then nobody would be poor ever again.
Let’s give her a Cabinet position!
Well, at least when it happens to the U.S. we won’t be able to say we didn’t know what was coming.
Remember also that California and several other states are even worse at managing finances than our failshit federal government, and California is crack-whore desperate already.
Hope is the thing with feathers what shits on our little country’s head I think.
The rubber’s about to meet the road
http://powip.com/2010/06/from-the-this-is-not-a-good-thing-department/
And we know what the usual responce from the Obamites and other progressives will surely be.
*
Oh great, increasing VIX is not a good thing either. Nor is that twitter handle!
Think of the twitter handle as an homage to the O! administration, Bob.
My experience of living in England in the late 90s was that there was a lot of strain in the society, strain that was being held together in part by the incessant governmental societal engineering. When the money runs out for that, will there be enough residual solidarity to hold things together?
Noah – I expect blood and alcohol to flow… ungood times for the British are a commin’.
Here‘s the other not good thing that people are talking about lately, Bob.
Sheet roofers may see business pick up then, I’d guess, as folks in need of replacements seize opportunity.
Climate change budget? Maybe part of their problem is that they have a climate change budget significant enough to be comparing other budgets to.
#13 – but it is still slightly below the Ministry of Silly Walks.