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Understanding basic macroeconomics is important, and what's more, is easy. Without macroeconomics, we can't hope to understand the "budget cuts" debate. Yet one of the most difficult issues to put over to the voting public is precisely the question of whether budget cuts are necessary. The typical voter thinks they are - and that in hard times, everybody (households and governments alike) must tighten their belts.

As many of us pack our flexible friends to jet off on holiday it's worth noting that in April this year private debt owed by the British people stood at a sky high £1460bn - that's a hell of a lot of plastic! Of course many of us these days have a credit card, loan or overdraft and nearly all of us will at some point in our lives experience being in debt in one form or another. In fact if used sensibly credit can be a good thing - it can help us through life to get a University education, own our own home or set up our own business.

Speaking to John Humphrys on the Today programme a few days ago (24 June), Nick Clegg sounded particularly uncomfortable dealing with the verdict of the Institute of Fiscal Studies that the budget would hit the poor harder than the rich.

Adapted from Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution

Not so long ago health food, solar panels, and electric mini cars were the purview of activists, hippies, and renegade engineers. Recently, however, a rush of fashionable responses to ecological meltdown has crowded out the previous generation's reaction-often characterized as strident and blaming.

The "emergency budget" of 2010 unfolded, as budgets are wont to do, in the oak panelled Commons Chamber, lined by hundreds of people - mostly men, it must be added - besuited, baying and occasionally gurning for the cameras. For decades, the same old drama has played out in the Palace of Westminster, and yesterday's events were no different.

As to the substantive content of Osbourne's Budget we can be brief. It is completely and utterly wrong in macro-economic terms. For a good account of the fundamentals of why, have a look at Lord Skidelsky's exact argument against cuts and remember this is a Conservative Peer!

So this is the first ‘coalition budget', that fortuitous blend of LibDem social conscience and Tory self-interest with which our nation has been blessed? Young George at the despatch box (with Young Nick nodding in approval behind) may have claimed his budget was progressive but the reality is otherwise. VAT is a flat tax (ie, it's regressive) and raising it in one jump to 20% inflicts serious pain on the poor---far more pain than the relief of raising the tax threshold by £1000.

George Osborne's first budget combined macroeconomic recklessness with microeconomic meanness to serve up a toxic cocktail not seen since the monetarist nadir of the early 1980s.

On the front page of today's Independent, Deputy Business Editor James Moore details high-profile calls for the cessation in any professional capacity of Goldman Sachs' work for the government.

In a high profile letter coordinated by Compass, which appeared in Saturday's Guardian, several leading figures rejected David Cameron's recent claim that Boris Johnson was responsible for the introduction of a living wage in London.