Pass the Parcel

Two months after Daveybloke's orange muffler claimed a moral dimension to the Government's attack on the poor and compared the idea of maintaining the public sector to "loading up our credit card with debt and then expecting our kids to pay it off", the Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that the only way many people will be able to survive the Government's moral scruples will be to load up their credit cards with debt. The OBR has raised its prediction of average household debt in four years' time by three hundred thousand million pounds; according to a spokesbeing, George the Progressively Regressive attributed the adjustment to "higher than expected inflation driven by higher than expected rises in commodity prices", since nobody, least of all George the Progressively Regressive, could have predicted that raising VAT would lead to prices going up. Of course, since we have Wee Nicky's very own word for it that national debt and household debt work in exactly the same way, the solution is simple enough. Once they have maxed-out their cards, hard-working families (the difficulties of the genetically continent are, as usual, not even worth considering) should default on their debts, order the Government to pay off the credit companies, award themselves a handsome cash bonus for doing so well, and start the game over again.