So many of London’s £1m-plus houses are occupied by workshy immigrant families of ten that whole swathes of Maida Vale have been transformed into vast welfare ghettoes, where Afsoomali has become the dominant spoken language on street after street.
That, plus I understand that huge numbers of City Boys have jacked in all that private equity malarkey because, let’s face it, most of them are better off on the sick. Continue reading
As economists we are opposed to the public sector pension reforms proposed by this government and Lord Hutton.
Public sector pensions are far more efficient than private pensions. The net cost of paying public sector pensions in 2009/10 was a little under £4 billion. The cost of providing tax relief to the one per cent of those earning more than £150,000 is more than twice as much. The total cost of providing tax relief to all higher rate taxpayers, on their private pensions, is more than five times as much. Continue reading
If there is one innovation amid the cuts landscape which seems at first sight attractive, it is the IDS brainwave of a universal benefit, joined this week by the proposal of a high-value universal state pension. Gone would be the almost impenetrable complexity of interlocking benefits, gone would be the hassle and indignity of means-testing, gone would be the disincentive of the poverty trap with its benefit cut-offs and tapering, and gone would be the high administrative costs and bureaucratic obstacles. Those gains are not to be sneezed at. But as with any single panacea, it’s not as simple as that. Continue reading
You have to hand it to the Tories. Hiring Frank Field as ‘poverty tsar’ to do a seven month study with no implications for the ‘financial’ side of things (e.g. benefits) is a brilliant stroke. Not only will they be able to parade in their non-partisan laurels when the report is delivered, but it’ll be tweedle-dum to Iain Duncan-Smith’s tweedle-dee.
Banging the education drum will be met with Tory plans to ‘individualise’ education provision by reintroducing credits for kids to go to private schools. Any action recommended to reduce poverty already has handcuffs placed upon it – it must be ‘consistent with the government’s fiscal strategy’ – and IDS has already made clear what that means. Continue reading
