Should George Osborne ever offer to provide your next miracle, bring your own loaves and fishes.

The Chancellor has been working on his act for four years now, but a star of the economic arts has yet to be born.

Where Britain's deficit is concerned, Coalition ministers talk endlessly of "the plan". To have such a thing is as good, it seems, as having the thing work. That's just as well. The Government's scheme is less off-track than on another track entirely, heading in the wrong direction, and taking the Chancellor's credibility with it.

Mr Osborne once assured us Britain's borrowing needs would be below £40 billion in 2014-15. If things go on as they are, judging by the most recent figures, the difference between income and expenditure could be £100bn next January. If the Treasury is very lucky, if everything goes right and the latest military adventure doesn't get too costly, £80bn might be achieved.

The reasons are not hard to find. Britain's recovery, of which the Chancellor likes to boast, has been a weak and shallow thing. Money is not flowing into the coffers. A low-wage, part-time economy based on an "any job will do" attitude has that effect on tax receipts. If a quick housing boom won't do the trick - and thus far it has not - stamp duty is of little help.

Once upon a time, Labour's Ed Balls would have had a field day with all of this. In the early days of the Coalition he offered what was called (not entirely accurately) a Keynesian alternative to endless austerity. Not any more. As was obvious, yet again, in the shadow chancellor's Manchester conference speech, Mr Balls would attack the deficit with the weapons that have failed Mr Osborne spectacularly.

Comparisons might be invidious, but they are also tedious. Labour will stick by Coalition limits on benefits spending. It will impose a real-terms cut on child benefit. It will go after the pensioners' winter fuel allowance. It will raise the pension age, even in those British provinces where dying too young is an ugly, enduring tradition.

A dash of supposed fairness aside, Labour's plan is Mr Osborne's plan. To please the less astute members of his business audience, Mr Balls also pretends he means to achieve a government budget surplus one fine day, as though taking money out of the economy is an aid to growth. That piece of nonsense is probably best forgotten. The real point of Labour's pitch, stressed by Ed Miliband, is that the party reckons it will need a full decade to make its version of austerity work.

Wittingly or not, Scotland voted for that on September 18. This - the spectacle of these two men competing to make the poorest pay - is what the UK's "strength and security" will mean for long years to come. Even familiar budgetary alternatives - Trident cancelled, bombing campaigns avoided - are dismissed without a second thought for the sake of a deficit reduction mania that grows more costly by the month.

Upon this swamp float all the brave arguments over "more powers" for the Scottish Parliament. There are plenty of people with thoughts on the matter. Lord (Robert) Smith of Kelvin is about to become wearily familiar with every last one of them as he attempts to lash the conflicting views of Scotland's parties together in double-quick time. The sword with which to cut the Gordian knot is back in its scabbard, for now. So think about context, instead.

If all you mean to achieve by enhanced powers for Holyrood is enhanced provincial democracy, fair enough. Let the locals have their say and their votes. Let them take responsibility, as they should, for their choices. Make them answer, if they truly fancy the job, for the ways in which they spend public money. But whatever transpires, follow that money.

Call it devo max or call it home rule: a proper settlement for Scotland would involve the transfer of responsibility for all of the country's income and expenditure. In the purist's (accurate) definition only defence and foreign affairs would be left to Westminster while faux federalists on the Tory back benches tried to sort out an equivalent for England. Despite anything Gordon Brown might have seemed to suggest, no such version of home rule is remotely in prospect.

If gradualism is truly your game that, too, is not wholly unfair. Scotland voted, for whatever reason, in favour of the parties offering contradictory versions of "more". Scotland's government must now work, as best it can, with what it can get from Westminster's next attempt to decide what more could and should mean. This tax or that tax, this share of revenues accruing and that portion of revenues returned: if splitting hairs is your idea of fun, there's entertainment ahead.

Should you have a taste for meaningful economic powers, however, think again about Messrs Osborne and Balls. Think hard. Given their devotion to chasing the deficit, which nice little revenue earners do you think those two mean to hand over to a provincial parliament keen on local economic growth and job creation?

The Chancellor has to think about the Tory MPs who are out of patience with all the bribes, as they see it, offered to Scotland. In his Manchester speech Mr Balls meanwhile seemed to make a particular point of ignoring the limited powers over income tax suggested by Scottish Labour. He's the opposite of keen. But neither man, determined to cut public expenditure and go on cutting, is enamoured of the idea that the Scots should emerge with real economic power while England toils.

"Enhanced devolution" can be a nice appeal to democratic sentiment, or lead to what Alex Salmond calls a "powerhouse parliament" in Edinburgh. In the present Westminster climate, it can't be both. The idea that Scotland could actually achieve more in economic terms is politically explosive south of the Border. You can guess as you please: the potential difference will be eradicated by a revenue-neutral (at best) reform of the Barnett formula - despite anyone's "vow" - or it will not be allowed.

Two million Scots sided last week with parties who say there is no alternative to austerity for a generation to come. The fact that austerity is an abysmal failure with brutal consequences was not mentioned in the Better Together small print. But the idea that "more powers" will mean more useful powers is a myth. No Chancellor, Tory or Labour, is going to allow Scotland the means to prosperity while he hacks away at the welfare state elsewhere.

The Scottish Government will insist, of course, that the maximum possible degree of devolution was offered and that the maximum must, in honour, be delivered. The Scottish National Party and its new leaders would be daft indeed to pursue any other course. But the Treasury will retain the whip hand, no matter what. It, too, would be daft to behave otherwise.

Mr Osborne will be at least £40bn short of his own declared target come next January. How in that context, in which Tory world, does "more for Scotland" sound like an idea whose time has come?