Should NHS funding be ring fenced?
If there’s one thing economists agree on it is the fact that the hole in the public finances – currently around £86bn (
103bn; $136bn), nearly 6% of the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product – needs to be filled. For deficit deniers, the reason this needs to be dealt with is that left unchecked the hole will get bigger and the consequences of that would be catastrophic for the UK economy. The problem is that a big part of the deficit is structural and will not be automatically repaired as the economy grows. To resume normal service, the thing that economists disagree about is how and at what speed to fill the deficit hole.
