Your editorial (The Guardian view on OBR v the Treasury: ministers have embraced the theatre of errors, 1 December) correctly flags the huge uncertainty in trying to come up with a five-year forecast of the difference between taxes and spending. Although markets like big fiscal headroom numbers, they seem to ignore the wise words of Bertrand Russell, who defined mathematics as “the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. This also applies to the concept of the medium-term fiscal headroom that economists and politicians alike are obsessed with.
Prof Costas Milas
University of Liverpool
The scrapping of the two-child benefit limit certainly seems to have polarised opinion. One camp reckons it should not have been scrapped at all, and the other reckons it should have been done a year ago. Who would want to be the chancellor of the exchequer?
Andy Smith
London
Recently I’ve been struggling to complete the quick crossword. Are my cognitive abilities declining, or is it the introduction of the cat with the Paddington stare that now appears above the puzzle in the print edition?
Alex Dickie
Edinburgh
Would the County Durham village of No Place make the list of inaptly named places (Letters, 1 December)? Should road signs to the village simply be left blank?
David Duell
Durham
I would expect the Oxford University Press to know that “rage bait” is two words (‘Rage bait’ named word of the year by Oxford University Press, 1 December).
Carole Ludlow Mooney
Bacup, Lancashire
