Bribing voters with their own money is no longer an option

Telegraph
"This election will be utterly different from the 17 before it - because parties will be judged on how they cut, not how they spend, says Frank Field ....This recession, however, has damaged the structure of the economy: the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that it has wiped out nearly five per cent of our total wealth. That means the country is permanently poorer, and will take well over a parliament just to restore its lost wealth.
....The Government admits that, even with the economy growing once again, there will still be a gap of £80 billion in 2013 between revenue and spending. ....Each week, the Government shovels out another load of debt on to the gilt market. Despite our printing money to buy back debt under quantitative easing, the task of selling more has been far from easy – and there will be something like 35 further debt auctions between now and the next general election, with each week's batch of IOUs proving harder to sell. ...The reasons are simple. Quantitative easing is coming to an end. Britain is borrowing proportionately more than any other major economy, and lenders have a galaxy of countries from which to choose. When the Government is unable to print any more new money to buy its own debt, the market will insist on higher long-term interest rates. This will not only make it more difficult to sustain an economic recovery, but it will increase the cost of servicing this debt."