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4 Responses to “The Good News For People On Low Pay….”

1. 
   1
   Colin Seagers:
   December 30th, 2012 at 08:12

   ….and there was I imagining that we have a Coalition government, that the Chancellor George Osborne is responsible for taxation matters and that he is a Conservative… I never knew we had a LibDem government, they must have won soooo many more seats in Westminster than first reported in 2010.
   Oh dear, just woken up in the shower (‘Dallas’ style for those with longer memories!!) and it was simply LibDem cherrypicking of Coalition policies, yet again!
   Happy New Year to all from the Coalition’s Conservatives.

2. 
   2
   admin:
   December 30th, 2012 at 01:12

   And a Happy New Year to you Colin!

   Yes , we have a coalition government,which is why I put this in the category ‘Coalition Government’. But this has been a particular Lib Dem aim for a quite a few years, which is why I also put this in the “Liberal Democrats” category.

   If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Norman Tebbit, who wrote the following in the Telegraph in 2010:

   I hate to say it, but only one party leader seems to have grasped that, if you construct a system where unskilled people are worse off by taking a job than by staying on welfare, they remain trapped in poverty – and that is Nick Clegg. Lord knows, Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith spelled it out in words and figures that only a simpleton could fail to understand, but the two main parties are unwilling to bite on the bullet and commit themseves to raising the income tax threshold from £6,475 to something like £10,000 or £12,000.

   It is madness to claim that people so poor that they need welfare payments are at the same time sufficiently well-off to pay income tax. The effect is that people at the bottom of the stack living on benefits who try to get back into work are hit by 20 per cent tax, 11 per cent National Insurance and benefit losses that can add up to amost 100 pence in the pound. It is all very well for the better-off to complain about the disincentive effect of losing 50 per cent of every extra pound they earn, but what about the poor devil at the bottom of the stack who loses 90 per cent?

   It need not cost that much. There would be a huge saving in benefits if we got those people back into work. We could redeploy all those people shuffling paper and money around the tax and benefit system to some useful work. And it would be easy enough to lower the 40 per cent threshold so that better-off people did not benefit from the increase in the basic rate threshold – so why don’t “the party of the workers” or “the party which believes in incentives” say they’ll do it? Why leave it to the Lib Dems, who are not going to have the power to do it?

   http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100022127/why-wont-the-two-main-parties-do-anything-about-the-madness-of-taxing-the-poor/

   Of course, we DID have the power to do it, because of our influence in the coalition.

3. 
   3
   Angelina Marriott:
   December 31st, 2012 at 08:12

   Never thought I’d say these words but I agree with Lord Tibbett on this one. This is my favourite Lib Dem idea. Happy new year to the focus team and readers.

4. 
   4
   Angelina Marriott:
   December 31st, 2012 at 08:12

   Oops typo, Lord Tebbitt.

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