Ö÷²¥´óÐã

It's not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.

The Today planning team evidently share my view on that and to that end have set up some interviews on bizarrely prosaic subjects of late.

We recently ran one on road signs, for example.

This morning it was the turn of chairs to take the spotlight. You can hear the interview with furniture designer Tom Dixon below. (Thinking about it, chairs are very relevant to this year's budget, in that when you listened to it you rather felt you needed to sit down).

So, what did I learn about chairs from meeting Tom Dixon?

At one level nothing at all.

You see, I had thought Mr Dixon would tell me about how a good chair works; what the optimal ergonomic design consists of; what the relative dimensions are that spread the weight of the body over the widest possible area. That sort of thing.

Not a bit of it.

He appeared remarkably uninterested in the functional aspects of the design and almost exclusively preoccupied with the aesthetics.

That was initially disappointing.

I thought I was somehow missing out on securing any crucial new insights into the pure ideal of a chair. Until Tom explained that good chairs are not about function at all.

And now I understand...chairs are really about meaning.

A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself.

That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions from academia to Parliament to the law.

And the implication is that the statement a chair makes through its design is as important as any ergonomic performance. Or to put it another way, most of us would put up with some discomfort to have the smartest looking chair on the block.

Obviously one can't push the argument too far...the comfort of a chair does matter of course. And some chairs - like the plastic one I'm sitting on, in fact - are designed to be little other than cheap, stackable and sturdy.

But the general message that there's more to a chair than its contact with our backside applies to most of what we consume. Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it.

And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.

Numbers have grown bigger in the last year or two.

It used to be the case that £10bn sounded like a lot of money. But after 18 months of banking crisis, we've all become confused.

Government borrowing was meant to be about £30bn, but will turn out closer to £150bn. The bank assets being underwritten by the taxpayer are £650bn. With numbers like these, (not to mention taxpayer exposure to bank liabilities running to trillions) why argue over the odd three or four billion? It seems to be worrying about the pennies when the pounds are evaporating.

Well, we at the Today programme thought it was a good idea to cut through the disorientation and ask what the long term effect of banking crisis plus recession has on the typical taxpayer. The answer is... £3.50 a day.

That number comes from the . We asked them for a "best guess" as to what the next parliament would have to do to reduce government borrowing under various reasonable assumptions about the economy, the recession and losses from banks.

There's no-one better to go to on this kind of issue than the IFS. Their independence is beyond doubt as all the main political parties recognise their expertise.

In essence, they think that 2.7% of national income has to be devoted to reducing government borrowing by 2016. That's in addition to the measures amounting to 2.6 % or so that Alistair Darling announced in the pre-budget report.

An overall fiscal tightening of about 5% of national income.

If you want to know what just the 2.7% of extra measures means - it is £1,250 per family per year in today's money, which you can divide by 365 to get £3.42 a day (which we round up to 3.50 to avoid spurious precision).

Now nobody really knows how bad things will be, so the results do depend on the assumptions you make. The full IFS thinking has been published, and you can find it .

What is striking about the figures though, is that the assumptions the IFS makes about the cost of bank rescues and the hundreds of billions of pounds of recession-related government borrowing are less important in driving the results than one would think.

Those big incomprehensible numbers we have been hearing about are usually one-off numbers, and reduce to much smaller, comprehensible figures when translated into our annual tax payments.

Take an example for sake of simplicity. Assume we lose a plausible £100bn in our "investments" in Royal Bank of Scotland. What does that boil down to?

Well, fortunately we don't have to find that £100bn every day or even in one go; its effect is to push up the national debt. At five per cent interest rates, an extra £100bn of borrowing costs the state about £5bn a year to service or about £3 a week for the average family.

That is not to be sneezed at, as it is incurred year after year after year... but it is not life-changing, certainly not compared to a fiscal tightening in the next parliament of five per cent of national income.

The same argument applies to the costs of fiscal stimulus packages.

Suppose we spend another £20bn on a new package. Like a bank rescue, that is again a one-off cost. Again, it is modest in the context of the overall fiscal tightening needed in the next parliament, adding "only" £1bn to the total of about £40bn.

It turns out that two unpredictable factors are more important than bank losses and one-off borrowing in driving the IFS view of how much pain taxpayers will suffer.

One is the rate of interest on government debt. With a trillion pounds of debt, a one per cent difference is £10bn a year.

The other is how well the economy recovers in the long term.

If the economy bounces back to its old trajectory of income and growth, the long term effect of the recession is small. On the other hand, if the economy bounces back to a new trajectory where, say, we are all permanently six per cent poorer than we had thought we'd be before the crisis, the finances look terrible.

Alas, none of us know what the interest rate will be on government debt, or how much of the current economic decline will be reversed when recovery comes. The IFS projections are only as good as their assumptions. Things could be a lot worse or a lot better.

But the message is that when it comes to taxing and spending, it is the on-going performance of the economy in the long term that matters most.