One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a chancellor in pursuit of good headlines - a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants who work for Starbucks or Jimmy Carr.
You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.
The populists always fail in their own terms. Let me be more specific, the protectionists always fail. They always end up delivering the sharpest fall in living standards to the people who are their biggest supporters.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.
A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
