The mid-year Exchequer Return released on Monday gives a somewhat noisy insight into the state of the public finances. It is hard to draw exact conclusions about the behaviour of tax revenue and government expenditure because of the changes introduced in last December’s budget and the reporting of the relatively meaningless ‘net’ expenditure measure which was also affected by the Budget.
Anyway, in this little poke into the figures we will just look at the Exchequer Balance which allows us to throw all these anomalies into the mix and focus on the final outcome.
Here are the cumulative Exchequer balances for the past five years.
At €10.8 billion, the Exchequer Deficit for the first six months of the year is better only than the €14.7 billion deficit recorded in 2009, but is worse than the €8.9 billion deficit recorded in 2010. However, the Information Note which accompanies the returns tells us not to worry because:
The year-on-year increase in the deficit was primarily caused by the €3,085 million in non-voted capital expenditure Promissory Note payments to Anglo Irish Bank, INBS and EBS. Excluding these, the deficit fell by over €1 billion.
This is meaningless and should more appropriately be described as misleading.