What’s all this bilge about "cuts"?

[insomniac]

From Daniel Hannan’s blog in Daily Telegraph

There comes a moment in the media cycle when a story is past the point of correction. We have reached that moment in the reporting of the “Tory cuts”.
The Treasury statistics are unambiguous. Total public spending has risen in every month since the coalition was formed. During the seven months that followed the general election, spending was £23.3 billion higher than during the equivalent period twelve months previously, an increase of seven per cent.
Say so, though, and you will be treated as a madman, as I discovered on a BBC phone-in over the weekend…
…Still, as I say, the story is now past correction. Denying the scale of the reductions – ie, quoting the actual statistics – is so jarring that, not only do you fail to convince, you damage your credibility across the board. It’s like claiming that Margaret Thatcher raised spending on the NHS: it might be statistically accurate but, to eighty per cent of your listeners, it establishes you as a liar.
What the government means by “cuts” is, in fact, what Thatch meant: that public spending will shrink as a proportion of GDP. In other words, the state sector will grow, but the private sector will grow faster. Since the former is funded by the latter, this surely makes sense.
Yet so embedded is the idea that there has been an absolute reduction in state spending that a narrative is now forming to the effect that the economic slowdown is being caused by “the cuts”. What cuts, for Heaven’s sake?

For full article:-
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100075917/there-havent-been-any-net-public-spending-cuts-but-try-to-say-so-and-youll-be-howled-down-as-a-liar/

[BennyB]

I agree with pretty much every word of that.

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