Is J-George Cameron Italian?

[secrets in symmetry]

I realised today that the Cameron/Osborne implementation of fiscal policy is having the same result as the many governments of Silvio Berlusconi....

They plan to (almost) balance the budget with almost zero growth in GDP. Two decades of this led to Italy's current problems.

Interesting....

[ducati]

I realised today that the Cameron/Osborne implementation of fiscal policy is having the same result as the many governments of Silvio Berlusconi....

They plan to (almost) balance the budget with almost zero growth in GDP. Two decades of this led to Italy's current problems.

Interesting....

Where did you get that? Italy's budget hasn't been within scores of billions of balancing in the last thirty years!

[secrets in symmetry]

Your are perhaps confusing the annual deficit with the net national debt.

Italy's annual budget deficit is much lower than ours. Ours is about 10% of GDP, theirs is about 5% of GDP. Both are heading in the right direction, but theirs is much closer to the EU limit of 3%.

Italy's net national debt is around 120% of GDP, up 10% from the 110% of 10 years ago. The UK's is at least 60% of GDP (perhaps a good bit higher by now), which is double what it was 10 years ago. Theirs is a mild chronic problem, ours is acute.

Italy's problem is that their growth in GDP has been very low for at least 20 years. It's averaged not much more than 1%, and it's barely broken 2% for more than 10 years. This means that although their annual buidget deficit has been quite low for 20 years, their lack of increase in GDP has allowed a monstrous national debt to build up.

The Cameron/Osborne fiscal policy for the UK is leading us in the Italian direction, which is very worrying.