The perfect fumble
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 3 Jun 2012
- Messages
- 24,304
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/18/britain-political-elite-fooled-us-again
"Every feat of misdirection is always intended to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. The same goes in politics – only here it’s aimed at taking our minds off the fact that all this jiggery-pokery is actually making us worse off. Let me show you what I mean, using figures calculated for the Guardian by academics at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) http://www.cresc.ac.uk/ , using official data. When Thatcher moved into No 10, 28% of all working age households took more from the state in cash benefits, in health and education and all the rest of it than they paid back in taxes. In other words, more than one in four employers in Britain were failing to pay their staff’s way.
More than three decades later, through Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron, that proportion has kept on rising. Now 38% of working-age households rely on taxpayers to pay their way. Think about all those tax credits for low-paid work, those exemptions for people earning too little even to be taxed. We have more people in work than ever before – and more households than ever before relying on the state to keep them afloat.
There’s nothing wrong with these people. These are the hard-working families politicians like talking about – the strivers, the squeezed middle, the alarm-clock Britain. But there’s a lot wrong with their employers – because they now rely on taxpayers to top up poverty pay, even while insisting on cuts in corporation tax and grants for investment. Come 8 July, it won’t be those businesses that the chancellor tells to change their ways – it’ll be the people they employ who will see more money taken out of their weekly budget by the cuts. Because the one thing we know about the next round of cuts is that they will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face."
"Every feat of misdirection is always intended to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. The same goes in politics – only here it’s aimed at taking our minds off the fact that all this jiggery-pokery is actually making us worse off. Let me show you what I mean, using figures calculated for the Guardian by academics at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) http://www.cresc.ac.uk/ , using official data. When Thatcher moved into No 10, 28% of all working age households took more from the state in cash benefits, in health and education and all the rest of it than they paid back in taxes. In other words, more than one in four employers in Britain were failing to pay their staff’s way.
More than three decades later, through Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron, that proportion has kept on rising. Now 38% of working-age households rely on taxpayers to pay their way. Think about all those tax credits for low-paid work, those exemptions for people earning too little even to be taxed. We have more people in work than ever before – and more households than ever before relying on the state to keep them afloat.
There’s nothing wrong with these people. These are the hard-working families politicians like talking about – the strivers, the squeezed middle, the alarm-clock Britain. But there’s a lot wrong with their employers – because they now rely on taxpayers to top up poverty pay, even while insisting on cuts in corporation tax and grants for investment. Come 8 July, it won’t be those businesses that the chancellor tells to change their ways – it’ll be the people they employ who will see more money taken out of their weekly budget by the cuts. Because the one thing we know about the next round of cuts is that they will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face."