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£1.1 trillion cost of Gordon Brown's borrowing binge

GORDON Brown’s borrowing binge will cost Britain £1.1 TRILLION.

The shock figure — equal to £40,000 per household — emerged as it was revealed the PM could impose a windfall tax on banks in a bid to claw back money for the nation.

But forcing the banks to repay hundreds of millions of the taxpayer cash used in bailouts will barely touch the £120 million A DAY the nation’s debt will cost us.
New figures ahead of Wednesday’s Pre-Budget Report show we will have to fork out an extra £44 billion a year for 25 years just to repay our debt.

That’s £120 million a day and the equivalent of another NINE PENCE on the basic rate of income tax for a generation.

And that will not clear all the country’s debt — just the EXTRA £670 billion Brown has committed to borrowing, above normal commitments. With interest it rises to £1,098 billion, or £1.1 trillion — more than the entire schools and defence budgets.

The figures are revealed as Chancellor Alistair Darling puts the final touches to his mini-budget.

And he’s considering vote-winning measures to tax bank profits and possibly even bankers’ bonuses. A Treasury source said: “It is being considered. The Chancellor has not yet made up his mind but it’s more likely than not he will do it.”

He is also likely to announce some tax-raising measures to fund new spending initiatives, such as helping jobless youngsters.VAT will go back up from 15 per cent to 17.5 per cent. And Mr Darling will confirm the threshold for having to pay stamp duty will move back down to properties costing £125,000.

It is understood he will cut tax relief on pension contributions for high-earners and will also freeze the inheritance tax threshold at £325,000.Writing in today’s News of the World Business Secretary Peter Mandelson says the government will gamble on growth. “We all recognise that the next few years are going to be defined by the need to pay down public debt after the spending needed to stabilise the banks and fight back against the recession. But the basic antidote to debt is growth.”

But Neil O’Brien, of the Policy Exchange think-tank, which calculated the trillion-pound borrowing figures from official Treasury documents, said: “The huge debt the government has run up is going to be harder to repay than people think.”

 

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