Today, Wednesday, is budget day. The Chancellor will announce spending plans for the year ahead.
Don't expect big pre-election hand outs - we've talked in lectures about electioneering in budgets. But this year will probably be different because of the extreme pressures facing the Chancellor. More spending or tax cuts would be irresponsible right now as folk up and down the country are tightening their own budgets, and would actually be politically counter-productive.
Hence, the electioneering (tailoring economic decisions towards re-election) will be the opposite of what would normally happen, I suspect today. The best decision for the election will be for the Chancellor to show restraint. But I'll probably be proved wrong...
This blog accompanies the econ101ab Principles of Economics course given at the University of Birmingham. The lecturers for both parts of the course (101a, microeconomics and 101b, macroeconomics) will occasionally post here on matters related to lecture material. We hope to show the relevance of the concepts we are teaching at each stage of the course for helping understand how the world works...
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