Spending review: ‘richest pay most’?

In his spending review, Chancellor Osborne said distributional analysis shows richest pay most when you look at “entire fiscal consolidation” – that’s all tax, spend and welfare decisions starting, I presume, with the last government.

No doubt if that’s right someone will extract the contribution of THIS government, but it’s extremely tricky calculating benefits from departmental spending by income quartile and there will be caveats and challenges to all this.

The IFS, now shorn of Robert Chote, will look at all this tomorrow maybe when it produces its analysis.