The Financial Times has just built a fancy new tool on its website. Appropriately it’s a deficit buster, so would-be chancellors can work out how to balance the books – and what would need to be squeezed to get there.
To get you started the FT team has been crunching the numbers themselves. And their brutal conclusion is that in order to halve the deficit by 2014 – as all three main parties have promised – it would require:
- 5 per cent cut in public sector pay
- freezing benefit for a year
- means-testing child benefit
- abolishing winter fuel payments and free television licences
- cutting prison numbers by a quarter
- axing the two planned aircraft carriers
- withdrawing free bus passes for pensioners
- delaying Crossrail for three years
- having roads maintenance
- stopping school building
- halving spending on teaching assistants and NHS dentistry, and
- cutting funding to Scotland and Wales by 10 per cent
It’s worth keeping this laundry list handy when the three leaders resume televised hostilities on Thursday night. Topic: the economy.
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