It has entered popular mythology that in the 1992 US Presidential election Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville hung a notice over Clinton’s desk that said “it’s the economy, stupid”. (It didn’t quite happen like that, but it’s close enough.)

The Coalition government has announced today (8 Nov 2010) a series of ‘Departmental Business Plans’, following up on the Spending Review announcements last month. These plans are supposed to be “revolutionary” in several ways. But this ‘revolution’ is more spin than substance, with much of what they are doing simply following in the footsteps of […]

Got to comment on the Public Accounts Committee (Parliament) report on failures in the efficiency programme, on the BBC Today programme here Last item of the day.

On this morning’s Today programme Education minister Michael Gove – reputedly a man of great intelligence – maintained that raising University tuition fees to nearly 3 times their current level for some Universities would have absolutely no effect on levels of applications from students from lower and middle income backgrounds.

After the post about the front loading of local government cuts I received this message from Carl Emmerson, the acting Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS):

A colleague in local government tells me that I missed the front-loading of the local government cuts in SR2010.

The Treasury and HMRC are apparently in turmoil over the attempt to impose a cut in Child Benefit for higher rate tax payers. Read this excellent piece by Iain Martin on the Wall Street Journal website. Who says “implementation” is a trivial matter?

Gordon Brown was notorious as Chancellor for announcements that looked and sounded good on the day, only to unravel as theatrics and wheezes became apparent as experts got to examine the figures. He managed to turn ‘the devil is in the detail’ from a infrequently used aphorism into an Iron Law of Budgets.

One question being constantly put to the Coalition government is what’s plan B? The Spending Review plans are massively ambitious not just in reducing public spending but also in setting out plans for most of public spending up to 2014-15. What happens if things change, or this doesn’t work?

I was fascinated by the fact that every time George Osborne mentions the Office of Budget Responsibility he prefaces it with the word “independent”, almost to the extent you could easily think it was actually called the Independent Office of Budget Responsibility.