LIKE a timeshare salesman desperate for his commission, George Osborne let Budget Day patter get the better of him.

At times he made mere hyperbole seem like the vice of the shy and retiring. Britain, he thundered, was "walking tall again". Britain was "the Comeback Country". Britain was "out of the red, into the black".

The less mentally agile occupants of the Tory back benches might have found this reassuring; everyone else lived in a United Kingdom in which public sector debt topped £1.485 trillion. In that country, government borrowing, just to pay the bills, was around £90 billion. In that UK, the chap doing the triumphalist tub-thumping was also the Chancellor who said there was no alternative to still more savage cuts in public spending.

Osborne was getting his forecasts confused with facts, of course, and that was no accident. He is nowhere near to reconciling his accounts, or to "balancing" those magical books. For general election purposes he had to pretend that his forecasts are infallible, his hopes are as good as realised, and all his dreams are bound to come true. Why not celebrate now?

We must keep faith with the plan, of course, by re-electing the Conservatives. If not, the fiscal fairy won't leave a budget surplus under George's pillow. In fact, we are enduring the Osborne Plan Mk III, arguably IV, but each unalterable scheme has had one thing in common: it has failed utterly to live up to its billing.

All targets have been missed; all forecasts have gone awry. In 2010, the Chancellor promised that the economy would be fixed by now. Last week, he pushed the finishing line back again, to 2019-20. So what are his forecasts worth? And why should anyone still believe that austerity will get the UK tribe to Osborne's promised Land of Surplus fully a decade after the long march began?

He needs voters to believe it if the Tories are to have any chance in the General Election. In particular, the Chancellor needs the right sort of voter, in the right sort of class and constituency, to believe it. If his trinkets appeal to the natives of Middle England they will show their gratitude at the polls. If Osborne's bag of tricks does its stuff, equally, the economy might respond well enough to compensate for all his cuts and nudge the Chancellor closer to those distant, elusive targets.

Beyond the flim flam, that was the Budget's point. No poor person was left better off. No hope of housing was offered to those who need hope most. There was nothing said - a remarkable omission, even by Osborne's standards - about NHS funding. Social provision, with all its ramifications, was simply earmarked for another £12 billion of cuts over two years without the Chancellor saying a word - an omission tantamount to dishonesty - about where cuts might fall.

Instead, self-serving ideas were passed off as big ideas. First, people with pension annuities were promised full access to their savings. In effect, Osborne was handing these voters their own money and calling it a windfall. Since only five million individuals would enjoy this liberty, however, the Chancellor was not exactly introducing a universal benefit.

Arguably he was on safer ground with a scheme to make the first £1000 of savings income tax free for the basic rate taxpayer. Savers, especially pensioners, have long complained that low interest rates mean derisory returns. Nevertheless, Osborne's election-eve answer was a subsidy aimed squarely at one group. Those who can't afford to save - 20% in the UK have no savings - were ignored.

In Tory circles, the Chancellor's decision to raise the higher rate income tax threshold by more than inflation must have looked like another masterstroke. In some walks of life, the complaint that too many have been allowed to slip into this bracket is an old one. By one calculation, you would need to be earning over £75,000 to pay the higher rate if the band had kept pace with wages since the early 1980s.

The fact remains that an annual salary of just over £39,000 as a single person would put you into the second-highest decile of earners in the UK. "Median gross annual earnings" stood - and it will not have increased by much - at £27,200 last April. When Osborne offers help to those earning more than £42,385, therefore, he is meeting the demands of just 15% of employees. The rest have to settle for a personal allowance increase offered to all. For those on the lowest pay, even that is meaningless.

Many in that situation dream of a home. Few dare to dream of ever owning a home. At every level save the very top, Britain is mired in a housing crisis. Britain is a lot happier - and Chancellors are very happy indeed - with a nice little housing boom. It creates the appearance of wealth and, for a while, the appearance of economic growth. How could Osborne resist?

He last made the attempt in 2013 when austerity's failures became obvious and a variety of house purchase schemes were introduced. The "help-to-buy ISA" is another attempt, and as blatant a state subsidy for those who need it least as could be imagined. With output stagnant and export performance dire, Osborne will give first-time buyers saving for a house a 25% Treasury gift. Parents of those prospective buyers, if in funds, will spot the bargain. The rest, the great majority, do not interest the Chancellor.

There's money for some, then, in exchange for votes. Yet when Ed Balls was asked about the Budget on Radio Four's Today on Thursday, the shadow Chancellor said he would reverse none of Osborne's measures. That was Labour's total: not one, least of all the "interesting" help-to-buy ISA. Help for savers, said Balls, was "good". This, it seemed, was opposition in action from the party that has agreed to preserve Osborne's cuts programme for at least its first year in office.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), proclaimed as an independent think tank, would grant Labour that year. Last week, nevertheless, the post-Budget analysis from Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, contained a fascinating observation. Noting the difference between a balanced current budget (Labour) and a balanced overall budget (Tory), Johnson stated: "In fact, our latest estimates suggest that Labour would be able to meet its fiscal targets with no cuts at all after 2015-16."

So when will that appear on the leaflets? It's easy to state: "Vote Labour and End Austerity in a Year." Instead, for all his warnings against Osborne's plans, Balls contemplates the final Coalition Budget before the election and says he will accept it all.

Tories once jeered at the shadow Chancellor as a "deficit denier". Now, while his opposite number plots another £40 billion of cuts (as calculated by a sceptical IFS) and bribes the middle class, Labour enlists once more in the phony deficit war.

Its sole alternative is a "sensible" mix of more cuts and some tax increases. None of it at the expense of those to whom Osborne panders. Precious little of it, even now, for the sake of those Osborne assaults.