Dear Editor,
The Chancellor is trying to distract voters from the record level of taxes by titillating friendly media outlets with talk of tax cuts.
This is highly misleading, since he is not even suggesting that the “stealth” tax rises which he and his predecessor as Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, have baked into the system should be cancelled – like the way they have frozen tax allowances, so that with ongoing inflation and resulting pay rises even teachers and police officers start to pay income tax at 40% rather than 20%.
Instead, he’s talking about superficial tax cuts which will create a day’s headlines, even though the overall level of taxes will continue to rise.
Yet his supposed headroom for tax cuts is a fraud anyway. The Government continues to borrow billions of pounds every month, which is added to the National Debt which has already trebled since they came to power in 2010, and the “headroom” is just a calculation that the Chancellor may be able to borrow even more without the bond markets melting down as they did under Liz Truss fifteen months ago.
It’s like taking your family for a slap-up meal because your credit card issuer has raised your credit limit, and for a few weeks you no longer have to worry about having your card declined at the supermarket checkout.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned that any tax cuts will have to be reversed after an election because in reality the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have a mess on their hands.
As even the Economics Editor of a generally pro-Conservative newspaper warned “Budget games cannot hide the real state of our public finances”.
He also stated “anybody who thinks this is a good way to proceed, or a recipe for healthy public finances, is deluding themselves”.
Yours,
Phil Tate
Chester
(pic under creative commons licence by Richard Townshend)
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