This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

The focus of politicians is, if they are fortunate enough not to have to survive merely the next few weeks, inevitably the next two or three years. That is how being in government works. But what they decide affects us all 20, 30 or more years ahead.

So we should welcome the work of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which this week published its look into the future of public finances right through the next 50 years. The report is called “Fiscal risks and sustainability”, and it is not pretty reading.

Among the unpleasant messages are that on present trends, the government’s debt will rise to 300 per cent of GDP by 2075, that healthcare will jump from 8 per cent of GDP to 13 per cent, that debt interest (which has doubled in the past six years) will reach 12 per cent of GDP, and that state pensions will go from 5 per cent of GDP to 9 per cent of GDP. The nation’s finances, it says, are on an “unsustainable and ever-rising path”.

The sooner the government acts, the smaller the scale of the adjustment, but even to stop the national debt rising relative to GDP it will have to make a permanent fiscal adjustment of 3.8 per cent of GDP by 2031-32.

To put this in some sort of perspective, think about the hot debate at the moment as to whether Andy Burnham is right to give a commitment to keep the triple lock on the state pension – that’s whereby the rate goes up by the lowest of three factors, average wages, inflation, and 2.5 per cent. But ending the triple lock is not nearly enough to........

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