Household income should be measured alongside GDP

CLAPTON

MacMickster wrote: »

The problem is not so much that data is missing, but the over reliance on GDP alone as the key economic indicator.

which data is missing?

true the newspapers only report on a very very limited number of figures but the rest are available if you want to look.

Generali

Tancred wrote: »

The tax credits system should have been reformed but the idea was a good one. Most advanced Western countries have tax credits of one kind or another.

The issue with state employees is not the salaries themselves, which are often lower than ones in the private sector, but the benefits, i.e. pensions etc. This has now been addressed.

The tax credits system is simply a redistribution of income via the tax system. By doing it in this way it is treated by accountants as a decrease in tax rather than an increase in spending so a Government can force the Opposition to accept a huge increase in the size and acope of the welfare state or get into a hideous and incomprehensible argument about the accounting treatment of tax credits.

Regarding the issue of public sector salaries under the last Labour Governments, there was a huge average increase in salaries in return for no extra output. There was a big drop in productivity as a result. Public sector pensions were a separate issue.

GeorgeHowell

Tancred wrote: »

True to a certain extent, however making more people poor is hardly going to help the country, is it? And your claims about money spent on iPads etc are plainly ridiculous and also insulting; many people just want some basic comforts and be able to live without fear. Not every poor person is a chav - many are simply unlucky or suffer from physical or mental ill health. The mark of a civilised society is the commitment to help the vulnerable and weak.

There is a difference between inevitable reduction in standard of living and throwing people into poverty. Having to give up a few luxuries does not constitute poverty, and relativistic definition of it is left wing nonsense. Of course there are some genuinely poor but that will always be so, some people fall into that state no matter what you try to do to help them.

To describe criticising iPad expenditure as insulting and ridiculous is in itself ridiculous. An iPad is an expensive adult toy, which can't do much that can't be done with a smartphone and/or netbook and/or laptop. One can hardly call it a "basic comfort". Moreover spending hundreds of pounds frequently to get the latest model -- slightly thinner, slightly faster, slightly brighter, but essentially the same thing -- is just extravagance on a "must have" status symbol. Similar thing applies to fashion clothing, we've already had the debate on gap years, and you're surely not going to defend spending on alcohol or fast food as a basic need that must be funded by the taxpayer. However I fully accept that not all those who waste money on excesses of these things are chavs.

I totally agree that the mark of the civilised society is willingness and ability to help the vulnerable and weak. The trouble in this society is that far too many that are helped out of taxpayers' money are neither of those things, in terms of any sensible and reasonable definition of the terms.