article: It wasn't so much "here's a rabbit from the hat" but more: "look over there - a squirrel!" So, with some nasty new forecasts, and without big changes in the near-term tax and spending totals, George Osborne opted to look busy - taking from bigger business and particularly the soft drink firms that put sugar into their fizz, while giving to smaller business, savers and higher rate income tax payers. He got busy at a very local level, even finding £5m from banker fines to build a leisure centre in Helensburgh. He halved tolls on the Severn Bridge and he's upgrading trunk roads across northern England (which ought to be very welcome to Scottish hauliers). Meanwhile, as the Chancellor was flunking some of his own fiscal tests, this Budget flunked a test that others had set him - to simplify the UK's horribly complex taxation system. By the time we find out if the claims of getting to a fiscal surplus, using 2020 vision, we'll surely have long forgotten the Budget of 16 March 2016. While Mr Osborne sounds confident about getting to a £10bn surplus, the forecasts on which he is basing that have widely divergent possible outcomes. He is going with the central one. But if you look at the forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, it has a 'fan diagram' showing the wide range of possible growth outcomes. The variation is not only for 2020, but for 2016 - ranging between growth of a sizzling 3.8% and contraction of a dismal 0.2%. So as forecasts are near certain to be wrong, how instead might this Budget be remembered? Perhaps for something that George Osborne only briefly mentioned - productivity. It's turned out disappointingly again. And that's knocked back the growth estimates for the economy, as well as for pay, for tax revenue, and for company profits over the rest of the decade. Britain's not alone in that. But keeping company with the USA on such numbers is not that reassuring. While George Osborne didn't say much about productivity, the Office for Budget Responsibility did. It was OBR numbers that forced the Chancellor into that fancy financial footwork. With its forecast last November, the OBR had taken healthy signs of productivity growth from the middle two quarters of last year, and projected them forward. However, the fourth quarter pushed productivity backwards by 1.2%, eliminating the progress made in the previous six months. Having assumed 1.4% growth over three quarters, it ended up with nothing. Duly chastened, the OBR turned more pessimistic this month, and reckons productivity will continue to drag. Back in 2010, when it was set up, the independent forecaster expected productivity to grow by 22% over the course of this decade. It now thinks that will be more like 14.5%. The US Congressional Budget Office, equivalent to the OBR, has revised forecasts down to a slightly greater extent. And as that is the main, long-term driver of real pay, it means Britain's standard of living will improve from the recession, but at only two thirds of the
summary: This was a Budget with a message about the next generation, and a massage of difficult underlying figures.