They just want to continue to spend and they know they will loose the next election.
The Tories come in and start to govern the country and that means more Thatcher type pain to get us out of this mess. Labour then of couse will try to pass the buck and blame the Tories as thay have always done.

It is just a repeat of last time only worse.

The worst thing that has happened to Britain since the war is GORDON BROWN both as chancellor and PM.

Labour can only spend not govern.

These are fighteningly large figures and does show that Brown has most definitely divorced prudence (if in fact they were every married).

Do not forget that there are other ways to tackle the pension black hole ie raising the retirement age as well as converting to a defined benefit scheme. Under the banner of harmonisation of pension provision will have us all having to plan and dig deeper to properly fund a decent retirement or opt out and work longer.

As to the bank such as Northern Rock and RBS a private sector option such as administrative receivership and sale of assets is one here rather than burden future generations with massive debt repayment.

The second is that the markets could lose confidence in the government's willingness to repay the debt. Traders may become concerned that the government will allow inflation to take hold, as a way of evading its obligations. (It's unlikely that a Western government would formally default, but inflation has the same effect as far as lenders are concerned.)

If the markets did lose confidence, it might happen very suddenly. The pound could start falling rapidly, and the government could find that it has to pay much higher interest rates on its bonds.

Brown and Darling are taking a big risk with the economy. If the markets lose confidence, they could have a sudden sterling crisis and a collapse in the bond market. An "acute" financial crisis is just what we don't need, when we're trying to fix the "chronic" issues in the economy.

Surely an underestimate, or are you saying that we aren't entitled to the state pension, or the state second pension?

If the state workers are costing 1 trillion, with a relatively small number of people compared to the rest of society, what's the cost of the state pension with 50 million in the queue? What's the cost of the remaining pensions for the 10 million retired (substiute more accurate population numbers)

The figure is going to be way above the 1 trillion mark.

He's another rough estimate.

40 million people yet to retire. Either they get a full state pension, or they are highly likely to be poor and get a top up. Cost per year of 5,000

Since it's inflation linked, we don't need to worry about present valuing anything. It's 5K a year, per person.

So,

So roughly, each person costs 100K to fund. (A bit of an underestimate since the corresponding annuity is 140K but makes the maths easy).

100,000 * 40,000,000 * 20 = 8 Trillion

About 8 trillion in debt on an on going basis.

Nick

Where are the UK expert blogger sites like the US has. "Burning our Money" and The TPA are doing a much better job than the big brain think tanks like the IFS and the IEA. Is there a conspiracy of silence; do they all belong to the same secret handshake clubs?

How about this for an off-the-wall idea. We put all the public sector pension funds – funded or unfunded – into one big pot. We stick all our credit crunch assets in the pot. Everything from preference shares in banks; equity shares; junk mortgage backed bonds; all public sector pension funds assets liabilities; and, public sector employers and employees contributions – where they actually make any real cash contributions that is.

We contract running the big pot to our biggest and best pension fund companies in a manor that will not overly distort the private sector markets.

When the dust settles, a lot of this junk is going to be worth something, so we sell it back into the market, put the cash in the big pot to help pay current public sector pensioners.

Every public sector employing entity gets the real bill for the cost of its pension provision – including the early leavers. That includes all the taxpayer contributions that go to top it up. We may all be aware of the work of Neil Record, that showed that a female police officer should be paying a total of some fifty percent of salary rather than the twenty percent she and her employer are now paying.(words left out)

Also, public sector employees and their trade unions need a dose of reality when they get to their next winter of discontent. We put a line on the pay check that shows the taxpayers contribution to the employees contribution. Should make for interesting pay negotiations and possibly the death of Defined Benefit public sector pension schemes.

John, please don't tell us the MPs pension scheme is fully funded because it ain't.

The frightening thing is, they plan to spend their way out of recession.

Well, I guess we are going to see the difference between a Tory boom and bust, and a Labour boom and bust.

After a Labour boom and bust, there is only a smoking black hole where the UK economy used to be!

It's a good job Mr Redwood has banned expletives on his forum, I have a few choice ones for Mr Brown!

Gordon uses the IMF figures to show us in a good light. I'm not sure what figures David Cameron is using to show us above egypt etc.

It would be a useful blog post to descibe how each set of figures quoted is concoted.