Question Author
The Sky News Economics correspondent has a decent handle on it.
Imagine, if you can, you are in the chancellor's shoes.
Your instincts are to cut taxes and reduce public spending yet pretty much every decision you've taken in office has involved doing precisely the opposite.
Worse: in recent months even when you have forked out serious sums to support workers, much of that money seems to have gone unnoticed.
This year alone you have unveiled two genuinely generous packages which will cushion much of the blow from higher energy bills and the rising cost of living, yet the prime minister and many of your cabinet colleagues seem to think you need to do more.
And things are about to get even stickier, for even after the rail strikes this week, the summer's trickiest decision is looming: how to navigate the demands from millions of public sector workers for significant pay rises.
They have a point: public sector workers have seen their pay fall in real terms by 4.3% since 2010 (compared with a 4.3% rise for their private sector counterparts).
Moreover, while it could be argued for most of the past few decades that public sector workers have considerably higher levels of pay (levels - not just annual changes in pay), these days that's not so clear.
While headline pay per hour for public sector workers is still about 7% higher than private sector workers, when you adjust for differences in working patterns and skill levels (it turns out that on average skill levels in the public sector are higher), actually public sector workers are now earning slightly less than their private sector counterparts - for the first time in at least a generation.
Time for the government to get on and govern instead of having to firefight Johnson’s misdeeds on a weekly if not daily basis.