Professor Michael McMahon:

I will give a summary. The basic answer is that we think of a good fiscal policy as ideally being countercyclical. Given where the economy is, it is not an economy that requires a big aggregate stimulus. We are seeing that in the summer economic statement not just for next year, but all the way out to 2026, which is as far as the budgets go. The second aspect that we would point to is the past mistake of relying on a particular form of revenue that is not necessarily reliable and sustainable into the future, and building permanent spending commitments on the back of that if or when that revenue stream disappears. Here, we are referring to the reliance on corporate tax and its concentration in a very small number of corporate entities. What we would hate to see happen again is for that revenue to disappear, because it would coincide typically with a big recession in the country. That is exactly the time the economy needs support, but because of these commitments based on that revenue we would end up having to come up with spending reductions and tax increases in a mix of a repeat of the post-financial crisis austerity which we know was incredibly costly for the country and nobody wants to see repeated. That is the summary.