“Politically motivated” Treasury posts 24m letters, telling you what your Income Tax and NI is being spent on

Fee, KJ and Chris somehow find it in their hearts to forgive Osborne...

SOURCE GUARDIAN: Osborne accused of using new tax statements as ‘political propaganda’

George Osborne has been criticised for sending millions of households annual tax statements that show the biggest chunk of their contribution going towards welfare, with trade unions describing it as “political propaganda masquerading as neutral information”. The letters are being sent – at a cost of £5m – after Osborne signalled that he wanted to make another £12bn of welfare cuts in the next parliament, raising suspicions that he is seeking to soften up voters in order to win political support for further reductions in the benefits budget. The letters are due to fall on to doormats over the next few weeks but the Treasury has quietly dropped plans to provide a further breakdown of benefit spending on the document. The breakdown does not make clear that most of the welfare budget goes to pensioners as well as sick and disabled people. The Treasury originally planned to show that just 3% went towards unemployment benefits, while much larger amounts went to children and families, elderly people and those unable to work. The letters make no mention of VAT, or duty on such things as alcohol and tobacco. Shabana Mahmood, the shadow Treasury minister, said the statements did not show that “families and pensioners are paying more in higher VAT. Independent figures from the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] show that by next year families will be £974 a year worse off because of tax and benefit changes since 2010.”

SOURCE FULL FACT: What you need to know about the Treasury’s tax statement

The treasury says that mailing out individual statements this week telling taxpayers what there money is being spent on is an act of transparency. But are the letters really that clear?

SOURCE: The Office for National Statistic’s Labour Force Survey shows that the number of "full time employees" had not recovered since the 2008 banker induced crash. The 'jobs recovery' is made up mainly of part-time and self-employed jobs.

SOURCE: The Office for Budget Responsibility, a body created by the government to provide independent economic forecasts, shows George Osborne’s current economic strategy will bring government consumption to the smallest share of GDP since before 1948 when the NHS was founded.

SOURCE CITY AM: So much for talk of a 2014 rate hike - Mark Carney says he "expects spring 2015 interest rate rise"

Against his own predictions, the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has all but ruled out an interest rate hike this year. In a speech to the Trades Union Congress, he said inflation lower than the Bank's two per cent target, slack in the labour market and downward pressure from strong sterling mean the current inflation environment is "benign". This means no rate hike this year, but the governor thinks spring could be the time: “It [the inflation environment] will not remain benign if we do not increase interest rates prudently as the expansion progresses.” Carney warned that although the UK labour market has recovered, this performance has "come at a cost". He said: “The weakness of pay has, in effect, purchased more job creation. It has not resulted in an unusually high level of profits... The burden of the Great Recession has been shared across the UK. Profits have been squeezed almost as much as labour costs. Employees have seen their real incomes reduced, but more people are in work as a result.” The fall in real wages since the crisis is the greatest such drop since the 1920s.

SOURCE HUFFINGTON POST: Bank of England Admits Plans To Cool Housing Market Will Have 'Minimal' Impact

Bank of England governor Mark Carney told reporters that the housing market remained the "biggest threat" to Britain's recovery, insisting that the Bank's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) "could not control house prices". He said that the Bank was acting pre-emptively in a "graduated and proportionate" response and that lenders were "on notice". In an apparent reversal of his earlier predictions, Carney appeared to play down the prospect of imminent interest rate rises when he appeared before the Treasury Select Committee this week. Carney had indicated in his recent Mansion House speech that the first interest rate rise may come "sooner than markets currently expect", leading many observers to speculate it could arrive by the end of this year. Labour's Pat McFadden told him: "It strikes me the Bank is behaving a bit like an unreliable boyfriend - one day hot, one day cold - and the people on the other side of the message are left not really knowing where they stand."

OUR RELATED STORIES:

The shift from full to part time explains 80%+ of the UK's 1m new jobs

Why do both the Conservatives and Labour push so hard for cuts to taxes and public spending when the British Social Attitudes Survey shows only 1 in 10 Brits want this?

Graphs at a glance: The great middle-income tax hustle: Since 2010 1.4 million people earning over £42k have had their marginal income tax rate doubled from 20% to 40%

UK banks Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scam compensation fund reaches £20billion. A swindle big enough to pay all their Corporation Tax for years

Global corporate and super-rich tax dodging in numbers (and a cool animation)

It's NOT good capitalism when one company pays its taxes and its rival dodges them

Pirate enterprise: Britain controls 9 overseas tax havens

Graphs at a glance: 9,836 prosecutions for benefit fraud v 617 for tax fraud. Yet benefit fraud costs us a fraction of tax fraud

Financial services corporation tax only contributes only 2% of UK tax revenues

Read how companies use "inter-country" ruses to dodge tax