by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
UK budget deficit 'to surpass Greece's as worst in EU' according to European Commission.
European Commission's spring forecasts put UK budget deficit this year at 12% of GDP – the highest in the European Union and worse than Treasury estimates, and this could have dire consequences.
The British budget deficit will swell this year to become the biggest in the European Union, overtaking even Greece, the European Commission said just before the 2010 general election in the UK, held on May 6, 2010.
The Commission's spring economic forecasts put the deficit of the United Kingdom for this calendar year at 12% of GDP, the highest of all 27 EU nations and much worse than the Treasury's own forecasts.
While the Treasury may have made such a forecast they have, ever so kindly and nicely, left the people of the country totally in the dark, claiming that we are well out of the recession and all such fairy tales.
The UK's budget shortfall was the third largest in the EU last year but will overtake both Greece and Ireland this year, according to the forecasters. Greece's measures to tackle its public finances problems are projected to cut deficit to 9.3% of GDP.
Worries about Britain's public finances – in their worst state since the end of the second world war – continue to unnerve financial markets and analysts are divided over whether a hung parliament will have the clout to rapidly reduce the deficit.
Alas, the government of the day, still the government at the time of writing, despite the fact of having, basically, lost the election, is trying too hide this truth of the state of the country's public finance from everyone and even seems to make itself believe that the problems are not there.
It is time that we all woke up to reality that we cannot go on spending money that we do not have, whether personally or as a country. But, alas, as per usual, while the people begin to understand that the government still in on a different planet in a different universe. Not that they are not there anyways most of the time.
© 2010
