Dominic Cummings And Douglas Adams For Joint-Chancellor

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams imagined a world where the economy is entirely built on binge drinking and video games.

This seemed like quite a good laugh in 1981, and an improvement on official government policy now.

Will they be dancing in the streets of Rotherham tonight on news of Jeremy Hunt’s bold and exciting 2p cut in the headline National Insurance rate?

I doubt it. In so far as it even makes sense to normal voters, it sounds boring. Like something economists talk about that is about as far away from their actual lives as fiscal headroom.

Jim Pickard of the FT tweets that during the thousands of vox pops he has done during his journalistic career, no one has ever mentioned NI. “Not once.”

I don’t recall it being a big issue for readers of the South Notts Advertiser either.

Tim Shipman of The Sunday Times says of the cut, Hunt’s second, “the definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result”.

Also in the FT, Diane Coyle, the professor of clever at the institute of being posh, says even the fiscal headroom stuff is nonsense (she uses different words than that).

Her words are: “The mistake often made is to assume that the fiscal ceiling is fixed by external forces.”

It’s not. The Office for Budget Responsibility comes up with a number, so if the economy grows, so does the theoretical headroom figure. But it is all theoretical.

Did the Chancellor make the slightest attempt to explain where he is trying to go and why today, beyond political platitudes? Well, if he did, I missed it.

I concede I am unlikely to be made Chancellor (you can make your own jokes). But if I were, I’d try to explain how government money works and what I was trying to do with it.

Keir Starmer, aping the Tories in really annoying ways, instead said: “Britain is in recession; the national credit card is maxed out.“

It’s NOT a credit card; saying it is just concedes all room he might have to do something useful once PM since he has admitted, wrongly, that he hasn’t got any money to play with.

The economics profession, and the chancellors who worry what it makes of them, has even worse PR than banking.

It talks to itself alone, as if actually explaining what it is on about to anyone outside the club would be an act of deviance.

Maybe Hunt’s 2p national insurance tax cut is a good idea. I can’t see why, and I bet no one reading this, or most of the voting population, remotely notices it in real life.

So it was politics. It had nothing to do with economics. The economics people should say that.

Dominic Cummings stuck his oar in, of course, and on this occasion his contribution was among the most sensible. 

He tweets: “On budget day remember – ALL OBR and other official budget numbers are 100% FAKE cos of the tens of billions in hidden classified budgets from the total shitshow of our nuclear weapons program over 20+ years. Fake budgets, fake debates, fake politics all the way down.”

Thank you Dominic.