Rachel Reeves had a difficult task: she had to please her backbenchers, comfort bond markets, sustain the promise of faster UK economic growth and stick to a plausible version of Labour’s manifesto commitment not to “increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT”. The Office for Budget Responsibility had also made achieving all this far more difficult by at last recognising that it had long proved too optimistic on future productivity growth. A plausible judgment is that the chancellor did not make things worse. But she did not make them very much better either. Not least, there is much at risk in a Budget that, according to the OBR, offers higher public sector net borrowing in every year before 2029-30 than it forecast last March. This underlines the absurdity of targets that bite years ahead.
蕾切尔•里夫斯(Rachel Reeves)肩负艰巨任务：既要取悦后座议员、安抚债券市场、维持英国manbetx20客户端下载 更快增长的承诺，又要工党宣言中看似合理的承诺，即“不提高国民保险，不提高个人所得税基本税率、较高税率或额外税率，也不提高增值税”。预算责任办公室(OBR)也最终认识到，长期以来，它对未来生产率增长过于乐观，这使得实现这一切变得更加困难。一个合乎情理的判断是，这位财政大臣并未使情况更糟，但也并未显著改善。尤其值得注意的是，根据预算责任办公室的数据，这份预算在2029-30年前的每一年提出的公共部门净借款都高于其3月的预测，这意味着巨大的风险。这也凸显了那些要在多年之后才开始起作用的财政目标的荒谬。