What Cuts?

I keep seeing (sob) stories on the news, and newsnight, various other articles about how this and that will suffer from 'cuts'

Exactly what cuts are these? As far as I'm aware, the spending review is still days away, people are assuming everything is going to lose funding, including healthcare (Newsnight participant), and it's all the good stuff the police do, 'how I need my benefits' yadda yadda

All very well - but I don't see why good programmes need to be cut - the government spending plan will not even be cutting expenditure, as highlighted by Guido, among others, merely reduce the rise in spending to nearly zero with inflation adjusted (even Thatcher only 'cut' in real term spending in one year) and for years we have been going on about waste and inefficiency - as soon as they announce what is effectively a balancing of the books, all spending is good!

Fact is, we have debt, we pay interest on that debt, it is good to not have to use our tax revenue to pay said interest - therefore we are either spending too much, or need to raise more

We need to decide in a grown-up way what we can do without - unfortunately everyone seems to have jumped the gun and believes the welfare state will no longer exist in a few years

This is despite the fact most cuts will come from general budgets - it is up to the budget holders, often the local government, government agency or whatever bureaucratic authority it is, to decide what to spend, what is necessary and what is not - this is common sense for any institution, whether private or public, or indeed personal, when available money shrinks

Cutting everything across the board, and for political gain, is not - it'll just make the situation worse, and for what it's worth the reverse, which is 'ring-fencing' the bloated NHS, which everyone thinks is wasteful, but wants, was a weak, if politically necessary, move

Nobody, except the media and Labour are saying all this will happen...