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Friday 7 November 2014

Friday, November 07, 2014 Posted by Hari 4 comments Labels: , , , , , ,
Posted by Hari on Friday, November 07, 2014 with 4 comments | Labels: , , , , , ,

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

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


4 comments:

  1. Richard Murphy does a lot of excellent stuff. We thoroughly recommend his material, and his pugnacious nature!.

    ReplyDelete
  2. THERE IS A USE FOR IT LIKE THE DAILY FAIL IT WILL DOUBTLESS BE VERY ABSORBANT WH0 NEEDS ANDREX?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Letter from Sir Andrew Dilnot, boss of the UK Statistics Authority, confirms that the 'welfare' segment of the pie chart "includes the main public sector pensions (for example, armed forces, civil service, Royal Mail, and teachers)". In order to inflame the public debate by exaggerating the welfare spend, the government would have us think the pensions earned during the careers of retired soldiers, civil servants, and teachers are 'welfare'.

    http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/reports---correspondence/correspondence/letter-from-sir-andrew-dilnot-to-will-moy-241114.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you for share this informative post.

    ReplyDelete

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