PUBLICATION at the weekend of an alternative funding strategy aimed at providing money for a range of supposedly priority capital projects has done little to help focus deputies’ minds on the key issues.

Instead, by suggesting there is a comparatively pain-free way of avoiding commercial borrowing, it will encourage members to decide how to go into debt – not whether they should do so in the first place.

Few islanders would disagree that borrowing is inherently bad. How many of them would own their own home if it was?

The issue is whether the repayments can be afforded, whether the expenditure warrants borrowing and how the repayments themselves will be funded.

Not many of us can find extra income at a stroke to buy a new car so borrowing means economies elsewhere.

For the States, with its increasingly evident contempt for taxpayers, the first option is always to take more cash off individuals.

So the consequences of borrowing – especially with two pots of cash to choose from – is particularly dangerous.

The reason is that it removes any need to look carefully at the ‘priority’ list of ‘essential’ projects. And if the Assembly actually gets its hands on the wherewithal to embark on a £301m. spending spree as envisaged, does anyone really think that any proposal – no matter how half-baked – will subsequently be turned down?

‘But we’ve got the money…’ deputies will say, glad to have avoided using that most unparliamentary of expressions: no.

We have already highlighted the questionable nature of many of the priority projects and it is clear that the estimates of what they will cost are just that, guesses.

Until they go out to tender, no one knows what they will actually cost but the total will not be what is in the Billet.

And if it is a few million more, well, it’s a priority and the States can always borrow some more.

The danger is not going into debt – but is the complete inability of government to take control of its expenditure as a whole.

Islanders are just about to be taken to the cleaners.