Champion of the low paid
The LibDem plan to abolish income tax for everyone earning less than £10 grand has certainly registered. You and I may understand their sums to pay for it don't actually add up, but then again, nobody's sums on any of this stuff add up. And outside the groupthink confines of the Westminster village, it is a truth universally acknowleged that tax cuts win elections.
So why aren't the Tories making more of an effort to counter the LDs repositioning themselves as the party of tax cuts?
BOM correspondent KK reckons Cam must be crackers, and urges him to remind voters of the Tories' past record. In particular, their record under Thatcher's Brilliant Chancellor Lawson, who delivered repeated real terms increases in the personal tax allowance to lift millions of low paid workers out of tax.
The facts?
In the six years of Lawson's Chancellorship, 3 million new jobs were created. But the number of taxpayers only increased by one million. Lawson had increased the real inflation adjusted value of the personal tax allowance by 15%, effectively lifting 2 million of the low paid out of tax altogether.
And what's happened in the two decades since then?
Well, there are another 2.2 million jobs. But unfortunately, the number of people paying tax has increased by 4.3 million. So all of those 2m low paid workers that Lawson lifted out of tax have gone straight back in.
And as things stand, it's about to get much worse. Darling has frozen the personal tax allowance at £6475 pa, so as inflation kicks in - as it surely will - millions more will be dragged into the tax net.
Cam should spell it out. His is the only party that has ever actually delivered what Clegg is promising. And he should tell us that lifting the low paid out of tax will be a priority for his government.
Not only is the right thing to do, but despite two decades of lefty propaganda about the sanctity public services, tax cuts are always a vote winner.
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