George Osborne has announced the first all-Conservative budget for nearly 20 years. The contents were unsurprising:
The most audacious piece of bait-and-switch is the announcement of the "living wage". Like the U.S. minimum wage work is now becoming a career imperative for many people and it's clear that it's impossible to live on minimum wage without a lot of help from the government (in effect tax credits are subsidising badly paying employers). The response is not to raise the minimum wage (that'd be too easy) but instead reduce the tax credit benefits and introduce a "living wage", an entirely optional and notional concept to compensate.
Poor people in work are the hardest hit by this budget.
http://ift.tt/1JTO5u1
As expected it was a case of political dogma dictating that the poor should be hit hard (the orthodoxy being that if you're hungry enough you'll work harder to improve the situation - despite all the evidence to show that higher levels of income and wealth inequality merely leads to lower levels of social mobility) and allowing the rich to retain as much as possible of their wealth.
edited to add......
Oh, and more spending on defence :mad:
- Hit non-pension benefits claimants hard
- Lower taxes for the very well off including a huge drop in inheritance tax
- Lower taxes for companies
- More austerity, but less severely than originally billed
The most audacious piece of bait-and-switch is the announcement of the "living wage". Like the U.S. minimum wage work is now becoming a career imperative for many people and it's clear that it's impossible to live on minimum wage without a lot of help from the government (in effect tax credits are subsidising badly paying employers). The response is not to raise the minimum wage (that'd be too easy) but instead reduce the tax credit benefits and introduce a "living wage", an entirely optional and notional concept to compensate.
Poor people in work are the hardest hit by this budget.
http://ift.tt/1JTO5u1
As expected it was a case of political dogma dictating that the poor should be hit hard (the orthodoxy being that if you're hungry enough you'll work harder to improve the situation - despite all the evidence to show that higher levels of income and wealth inequality merely leads to lower levels of social mobility) and allowing the rich to retain as much as possible of their wealth.
edited to add......
Oh, and more spending on defence :mad:
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1eI2bDV
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