Osborne has to eat his words?

[Miss Ben E F]

Osborne has to eat his words?

He should trying living on a normal weeks shopping, that would stick in his craw!

[mj.scuba]

Osborne has to eat his words?

He should trying living on a normal weeks shopping, that would stick in his craw!

 

By definition, if he did a "normal" weeks shopping (what he normally gets every week), he'll do fine won't he?

[Wildcat]

Because otherwise you end up with a downward spiral of hitting the better off all the time with tax rises or allowance cuts. This in turn incentivises people to look to move to a country with a better tax regime, the very people who contribute the most in tax.

 

It does not matter what the effect is purely in terms of taxation. Tax is there to redistribute wealth to create a fairer society. What we have seen over tha last 10 years is the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer, that is why regressive taxation is such a concern, instead of mitigating the unfairness of the economic system like it should do it is exacerbating it.

 

# Over the last decade, the poorest tenth of the population have, on average, seen a fall in their real incomes after deducting housing costs. In other words, after adjusting for inflation, their incomes are, on average, slightly lower than a decade ago. This is in sharp contrast with the rest of the income distribution, which, on average, has seen substantial rises in their real incomes.

# The richest tenth of the population have seen much bigger proportional rises in their incomes than any other group.

# Except for those in the top and bottom tenths of the income distribution, households with below-average incomes have, on average, enjoyed bigger proportional increases over the last decade than households with above-average incomes.

# In absolute (as opposed to proportional) terms, the vast majority (four-fifths) of the extra money has gone to those with above- average incomes and half of this (i.e. two-fifths of the total) has gone to those in the richest tenth.

# The poorest tenth of the population now have, between them, 1.3% of the country's total income and the second poorest tenth have 4%. In contrast, the richest tenth have 31% and the second richest tenth have 15%. The income of the richest tenth is more than the income of all those on below-average incomes (i.e. the bottom five tenths) combined.

# The proportion of total income going to the richest tenth is noticeably higher than a decade ago: 31% in 2008/09 compared with 28% in 1998/99. The rest of the income distribution changed little over the last decade.

 

http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml

 

Furthermore we have one of the highest chances of in work poverty in Europe.

 

http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk/2010/10/the-uk-has-a-high-risk-of-poverty-by-european-standards/