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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House shots. Now, listeners are probably sick to the back teeth of the spending review. I'm certainly getting a bit bored of it and I'm

the economics editor. So today we thought we'd go into some sort of bigger picture questions about

Britain's economy. Now to help us do that, I'm delighted that we're joined by Paul Johnson,

who's the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and also the offer of the

very good book, Follow the Money, and also Ruth Curtis, who's the chief executive of the

Resolution Foundation and was also once the director of fiscal policy in the Treasury.

Now, Paul, to start us off, one of the issues with the spending review, having said I'm just not going to talk about it, and indeed any fiscal event, is very quickly, certainly in recent years, we seem to talk within days about whether taxes are going to have to come up, come the autumn, whether cuts are going to be there because of this fundamental imbalance. It seems to

me that there's some sort of structural issue with, since COVID, since Ukraine, since the energy

crisis, we've come to expect more from the state, a bigger state, but our taxes don't seem

to pay for that. But given that the tax burdens at an all-time

high, how can that be the case? What's the problem here? Yeah, it's a good question. As you say,

the tax burden is at an all-time high, and yet it's not obvious that our public services are

super wonderful compared with what we've been used to in the past,

to put it mildly. We've got problems in the prison system, the justice system, the social care

system, backlogs in the health service, and goodness knows what else. And yet, the size of the state,

the level of taxation, is about five percentage points of national income bigger than it's

been for most of my lifetime. And that

give you a sense of scale is about 150 billion pounds. So what on earth is going on? Well, part of

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