Taxing Times

‘NO sooner has Tony Blair lost the under-nine vote with more bananas and less crisps, than the Times reports that the middle classes are on the drift.

Time to give Tony the axe?

The paper’s headline (“Tax assault on middle class cuts incomes as poll looms”), paints a pretty bald picture.

But it gets worse when readers learn that the average household income has fallen for the first time in 15 years. And that’s according to the Government’s own figures.

And the middle classes are being hardest hit - people earning more than £27,000 a year suffered a one per cent fall in their incomes last year.

Unsurprisingly, the Telegraph leads with the same story. And hits readers with double whammy by publishing a report by actuaries Watson Wyatt.

The firm found that, based on a £200 a month investment in the typical with-profits pension, since the Chancellor “raided pension fund dividend income in 1997”, the average payout would have dropped from £20,5000 to less than £5,800.

Which, as Tony could tell you, is a lot of school dinners…

Paul Sorene is the Anorak’

Posted: 31st, March 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink