Labour Chancellors are particularly good at it. Today’s Spending Review was Reeves’s first big opportunity to let loose.
Spending public money is always more fun than the hard work of saving it, as she’s already discovered to her cost.
Axing the winter fuel payment and trimming disability benefits sparked uproar – and a Labour civil war.
That’s not what Labour wants to do in power. It wants to tax people and spend the proceeds. Today, Reeves got to enjoy herself.
So out rolled the commitments. More cash for Sizewell C, defence, the police, schools, asylum, the steel industry, Heathrow expansion and, of course, the NHS.
There was far less detail on how she plans to pay for any of it.
Pressed by Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Reeves refused to explain, merely repeating her mantra that “we will never have to repeat a budget like that again”.
By that she means last autumn’s Budget, which included £40billion worth of new taxes, helped wipe out 100,000 jobs and stall the economy.
The next one, Reeves insists, won’t be as severe – but it will still cost us dear.
Stride called it the “spend now, tax later review”.
He said Reeves knows she’ll need to return in the autumn with yet more taxes and warned that we face “a cruel summer of speculation”.
And just like last year, that speculation will cause real damage.
After the 2024 election, markets began to panic over her £22billion black hole and the “difficult decisions” Reeves had promised to make in her autumn Budget.
As speculation swirled over tax hikes, consumers stopped spending and businesses froze investment.
Confidence vanished. We see the consequences today. Now we’re braced for a repeat performance.
Reeves says she will honour Labour’s pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, the three biggest taxes of a ll. So the money will have to come from hiking a smaller range of taxes instead.
An extended income tax freeze, inheritance tax clampdown, steeper capital gains tax – all are on the table.
Motorists may also pay the price, with talk of a 10p hike in fuel duty.
Reeves made a virtue of taxing to fund her spending. But if the burden becomes too great and growth stalls, tax revenues could fall instead.
We’ve already seen that play out.
There’s also the small matter of Britain’s national debt, which is only heading in one direction. The UK is now spending £9billion a month on debt interest and is at the mercy of bond markets.
If investors think Reeves has lost control, our borrowing costs could spiral and become unaffordable. There’s no “fiscal firepower” left to respond to a shock. A full-blown financial crisis is not out of the question.
Stride scorned the idea that Labour has brought “stability”. There’s little of that anywhere – but especially not here.
At times like that, she seems completely detached from reality. Talking of being detached from reality, she still founds billions for Ed Miliband’s pet projects.
Today, she had her fun. Taxpayers now face a long summer of anxiety, and a costly reckoning in the autumn.