LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced a budget allocating billions of pounds to households crushed by high prices. The stated goal is to provide the species with "air." The air will be manufactured by borrowing. The treatment for the fever is a blanket woven from the fever's own threads.
The mechanism is a study in sleight of hand. Step one: the Treasury displays an empty wallet to the gallery. Step two: it produces a rabbit composed of numbers borrowed from institutions licensed to store numbers. Step three: the rental fee for the hat — known locally as "gilt yields" — rises the moment the rabbit appears. Step four: the fee is added to the bill of every spectator in the room. Step five: the spectators applaud the rabbit for relieving them of money they did not yet owe.
Financial markets performed the arithmetic within the hour. The money saved by households on their bills is currently being offset by the increased cost of servicing the debt incurred to save it. The oxygen is intended for the households. It is also intended for the Chancellor's party, whose approval ratings were recently discovered to be in respiratory distress.
"We are not creating debt," a senior Treasury official explained, adjusting a cufflink. "We are relocating it to a jurisdiction where it cannot testify against us until 2030."
Margaret Ellison, chair of the Backbench Business Committee, was calmer. "The voter lives in the present," she observed. "The repayment schedule lives in the future. I have checked the electoral register, and the future does not appear to be registered to vote."
In my years with the Octopus Collective of Rigel-7, we resolved internal deficits by transferring mass to the tentacle furthest from the brain. The brain felt lighter. The tentacle eventually detached, but the sensation of lightness was, for a time, statistically undeniable. The Chancellor calls it a rescue. The audience applauds the rabbit. They have not yet been presented with the invoice for the fur.
