Monday, 7 September 2015

Conservative commitments -25, 21 fails


Raising the threshold for the 40p rate of tax so that nobody under £50,000 pays the rate
Bad grammar annoys me. A person isn’t under £50,000 (unless he’s buried under a pile of cash). A person’s earnings might be under £50,000. This is a straightforward tax cut for the well-off. I understand that someone earning above £43k might not feel rich; an overpriced home, expensive children and a lot of travel costs can drain a decent income very fast. But the fact remains that both the average and median wages are in the £20ks. Individuals earning twice that are not the ones who need help from a limited government budget undergoing severe austerity. I’ll do rather well from this change, but I still think it’s wrong.
   The total cost to government is apparently ‘forecast’ to vary over the coming years. The first set of changes will cost £1.6 bn per year by the end of this Parliament, but that will only take us half-way to the manifesto commitment. It’s hard to predict what further changes would do, and I can’t find an attempt, but let’s just double the cost so far to be over £3bn per year.

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