I don’t like politicians, I don’t like taxation, I don’t like spending more money than I need to.
Hence, I don’t like Budgets. Because they almost always leave most people worse off than they were before it. And worse than that, they pretend otherwise.
Such was the case yesterday, wherein TLW & I discovered that we’re going to be worse off by a couple of hundred quid. Which is vexing.
That said, there are two things that give me a little cheer from yesterday’s budget: scrapping the fuel escalator (which has always struck me as unbelievably blatant theft) and starting the ball rolling on joining NI and income tax – it’s long past time when NI was anything other than another income tax going straight to the pool of general taxation. Not giving thieving bastard lying politicians1 the opportunity to raise the NI rate while claiming not to be increasing tax is clearly an improvement.
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1 – Some redundancy in the previous four words, obviously. And if you can think of a better example of a thieving bastard lying politician in this regard than Gordon Brown, you’re a smarter person than I.