Quote: Fetlar "How can it be rational to propose more borrowing when we've had to print 25% of the money we've borrowed already?'"
Well, first of all what Mervyn King said was that 25% of GDP is now QE.
The simple answer is that you'd borrow it to do different things than what this government have done. So far, QE money has gone to recapitalising banks and keeping interest rates down, not to doing anything particularly useful. So you'd borrow to get people back into work, thereby increasing tax revenues and creating a virtuous circle of growth. You don't pay back that debt straight away, the cuts come during the good times. It's the nature of governments that they have to spend & cut countercyclically. The emphasis on cutting the deficit quickly is intuitive, but disastrously misguided.