This could lead to Ed Balls becoming chancellor but not having a majority for his Budget - precisely the "Tory trap" which former Chancellor Gordon Brown warned against and the "flood of tears" which Alistair Darling predicted.
By July of that year, I already had to ask: "[W]here's Will now that House Republicans, both directly in bills and indirectly in the way they are playing debt negotiations*, are shredding budgets for precisely the kind of frontier work he claimed to champion last winter?
But what's the most striking fact about Ryan's budget plan is precisely that it is a budget plan — it's a document concerned with government finance, not the crisis in the economy.
"We've got to close the carbon budget to know precisely what's going where," said Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University in Indiana.
Yet failure to do this would only underline the saying, often attributed to Henry Kissinger and paraphrased here: the politics (around the EU budget) are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
The cut in that category is typical of a budget that savages precisely the kind of domestic spending, like job training and Pell grants, needed to help people get off social-safety-net programs, while slicing open the net itself, through big reductions in Medicaid and food stamps (all while generously lowering taxes for the rich).
But the budget proposal is precisely that; it's Congress, not the president, that ultimately decides how to appropriate tax dollars.
After decades of deficits, the federal government has now run an "on-budget" surplus for precisely one year.
According to The Guardian, the Police Association said it was a "slap in the face" that its security forces were not paid, when funds were budgeted for APEC precisely for their work.
Some of the support so far, in particular under sector budget support, is designed precisely to help the most vulnerable.
