Billions and Squillions
On Good Morning Ulster earlier I summarised the "cut now, cut later" dillemma for the Executive. Within the last few minutes the Finance Minister Sammy Wilson has been giving a few more specifics. His latest estimate for the potential cuts here in the forthcoming emergency budget is £120 - £150 million, which is lower than the £200 million figure which the DUP bandied about during the election campaign.
Mr Wilson also outlined three approaches - implement the cuts now in full, defer in full, or, his apparently favoured middle way, make some of the required savings but not all. He suggested that any money not spent by departments, which is normally redistributed in the in year spending rounds, should instead be used for our portion of deficit reduction.
Questioned about introducing water charges (a course of action the Finance Minister is thought to privately regard as inevitable), Mr Wilson argued that because of the legislative requirements these could not be brought into operation even in time for the next financial year.
Whilst our focus is inevitably on the prospects for immediate pain I don't think I adequately conveyed the scale of what may be coming down the track. The emergency budget in-year cuts proposed by the Westminster coalition amount to £6 billion. However this is just a first payment to try to reduce the UK's budget deficit, running, at the last estimate I saw, at £178 billion. That's around 12% of the UK GDP, whilst the EU deficit target is 3%. Reducing the deficit to the target figure of around £40 - £45 billion would require savings in the order of £133 billion. So if you paid off £6 billion in one go, you would still have another £127 billion to pay.
If, like me, you find all these figures seem like so much monopoly money, think of it in the terms my cameraman told me about when we were waiting for David Cameron to emerge from the Castle yesterday lunchtime.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. And 178 billion? Well you do the maths.
I'm 
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