Johann Hari’s Ox Is Gored, And Gored Thoroughly….

…and the screams of anguish are earsplitting:

Who have they decided can afford to take the pain first? Not rich people like them: they will continue to enjoy big state subsidies to build up their savings and maintain their estates. No. Step forward instead the unemployed, poor kids who are falling behind in their reading, children in care, the elderly, the disabled, and any feeble little steps we were making towards building a low-carbon economy.

Hurrah! When do we start sending the kiddiewinks up chimneys again?

When you hear that the Communities Department has taken a 27 per cent cut, it sounds anodyne: what is it anyway? It's the money that goes to local authorities to pay for home help for the elderly and disabled, for monitoring children at risk, and children in care. Osborne has said he doesn't want councils to make up the difference by increasing council tax. So, very soon, there will be a big increase in the number of confused old people left unwashed and untended, and abused kids we never find in time.

And we’ll notice that, will we? We’ll be able to compare it to the halcyon days of the Labour Period, when there were no abused children, no elderly left to die in squalor, and we all ran frolicking in the meadow among the sunbeams?

Many of these cuts will end up costing us money in the long term. Over the past few years, children – mainly in poor areas – who have not been able to learn to read have been given special one-on-one tuition to get them up to a decent standard, rather than tumbling through their school years getting more confused and angry.

I note that he doesn’t ask the question of just how it is that the normal comprehensive education isn’t sufficient to enable children to learn to read…

Literate people are far less likely to commit crime and much more likely to pay taxes later in life.

Really? All those thieving bankers and fat cat industrialist tax-dodgers and expenses-fiddling MPs that he’s always whining about had good educations, didn’t they?

Cameron just closed the programme. The same child who loses her reading tutor now also won't get a small Child Trust Fund of £2,000 when she turns 18 – thanks to a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives on an £4.2m trust fund of his own.

Yes, Johann, but I don’t begrudge him his trust fund because he isn’t sticking his hand in my pocket to pay for it. Which is most certainly not the case with the government scheme, is it?

David Cameron's claims to care about global warming also just drowned. The subsidy to build wind turbines, the encouragement to buy electric cars – all gone.

Hurrah! In fact, double hurrah! Bring on the nuclear power!

Of course, the Cameroons say they have no choice but to do all this, because we are "bust". There is currently a £178bn-a-year gap between what the Government takes in, and what it spends. But there are two crucial questions here: when the Government should close this gap, and how it should close it.

The answers being ‘soon’ and ‘by any means necessary’…

It seems logical to pay off a debt as soon as possible.

Why, yes, it does. But that world-renowned economist, Mr J Hari, disagrees.

Better a deficit than a depression. Better to pay interest tomorrow than the dole to millions more today. And when the time for closing the gap does come, there is a much better way to do it – by closing the income gap. The first people to pay should be those who can afford it: the wealthy.

OK, we’ll target all those quango heads on more per annum than the Prime Minister. OK with you?

For example, the 1,000 richest people in Britain have added £77bn to their wealth in the past year alone. Can't they afford to make sacrifices a little more easily than a 17-year-old on the dole?

Yes, they probably could. They could also afford to up sticks and decamp for friendlier climes, and then we wouldn’t have them here, employing people, using goods and services… Would you like to see that, Johann?