Inequality
Blair on Syria, tax and immigration
I didn’t have time to comment on Tony Blair’s interview with Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson in yesterday’s Times (pay wall). First, there was an update on the growing Blair staff, now 200 people in his foundations and companies. For the haters, this is Blair Inc, a secretive network of byzantine money and power. For [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 16 June 2013 at 5:56 pm
The Fiction of Gatsby
“In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels.” So wrote Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian economics leader-writer, yesterday. It is just not true. I don’t know as much about America, but it certainly isn’t true about Britain.
It is a popular myth of anti-Labour propaganda: that the gap between rich and poor expanded greatly under Tony [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 3:48 pm
The New Fallacy
Ferdinand Mount – The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy (Simon & Schuster, 26 April 2012)
Now might be a good time to post my review of Ferdinand Mount’s comically trite book. It starts with information that “everyone knows”, namely that the gap between rich and poor is widening. It isn’t. But it did in the [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 12:17 pm
“Cut taxes to close the deficit” 2
The sequel to my post yesterday was a discussion (audio here) I had at the Spectator’s beautiful wood-panelled offices in Westminster with Fraser Nelson, the editor, about his belief that any marginal rate of income tax higher than 36 per cent loses the government more money than it raises.
He cheated slightly at the end, when Sebastian Payne [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 14 March 2013 at 7:34 pm
“Cut taxes to close the deficit”
Yes, Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, still peddles this tosh. “How do you get more tax from the rich?” he asks at Coffee House. “Cut their tax rates.”
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 13 March 2013 at 5:47 am
What tax rate is too high?
I was on Iain Dale’s LBC radio programme on Sunday, talking about Labour’s tax policy. I said I was in favour of a mansion tax in principle. Jonathan Portes, of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, was also on and explained why a land tax (of which a mansion tax would be a progressive form) was economically efficient, so I agreed with him.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 20 February 2013 at 3:14 pm
Cameron boasts he has “hit the richest households hardest”
I hadn’t had time to read the Institute for Fiscal Studies Green Budget before Prime Minister’s Questions, but it was brought up by Lorely Burt, the Liberal Democrat MP for Solihull, who asked David Cameron if he had noticed that the IFS had “confirmed” that raising the income tax threshold “is right”, and that the [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 2:03 pm
Inequality and Poverty
Readers of my article in The Independent yesterday, which pointed out that the Coalition Government has neither increased inequality nor seems likely to do so significantly, continue to demand further particulars.
The main objection, apart from my leaving “the cuts” out of the picture, about which I wrote this morning, is that, to take the IFS [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 28 December 2012 at 10:45 pm
Further Complexity in the Equality Debate
The suggestion that income and wealth might be becoming more equally spread in this country, in my article in The Independent yesterday, provoked two main negative responses: denial and cavilling.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 28 December 2012 at 9:30 am
The Egalitarian Coalition
I have a column in The Independent today with which some people do not agree. Which is interesting, because it is mostly factual, reporting two sets of figures that were published in June and July this year.
They suggest that the gap between rich and poor has, if anything, narrowed under the Coalition Government.
The links to the [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 26 December 2012 at 10:59 pm
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