Which generation has been hit hardest by the government’s austerity measures? It is the question that has been at the top of the political agenda since the budget sparked accusations that the government was raiding pensioner’s pockets with a new Granny Tax. FactCheck investigates.
Gary Gibbon
Interesting to see if it moves after the headlines yesterday. I was struck (not physically) at a pensioners’ line-dancing club in Lewisham yesterday by how few pensioners had actually bought a newspaper that day. They’d got their information off the TV news, formed a pretty dim view of what was going on but were, for the most part, not in open revolt.
Gary Gibbon
A level of taxation that was once meant for a relatively small minority of the wealthiest members of the working population could be moving towards a state where a huge chunk of the population might find themselves in its grasp in the course of a working lifetime.
The fact remains that the decision on the 50p rate was made on the basis of one year’s highly distorted data. In some ways it was set up to fail. Many economists will argue that it was always going to.
“It’s such a huge shortfall that both sides have only just stopped short of accusing each other of cooking the books.”
Gary Gibbon
George Osborne just announced a “tax simplification” measure for pensioners’ tax allowances. Count your spoons time! Harmonising allowances for over 65’s with everyone else’s allowances will mean the over 65’s get less tax free over the years.
• Top rate of tax cut to 45p from April next year • Child benefit cut-off point rises to £50K • Are personal allowances changes a ‘granny tax’? Read Gary Gibbon’s blog: 50p tax – hero to zero? 13.47: Ed Miliband compares the government to Downton Abbey, a story of the “out of touch rich”.…