Sunday Times becomes ever more like the Daily Mail

28 Mar 2010, by Nigel Stanley in Economics, Politics

There’s a piece in today’s Sunday Times that plays exactly the same trick as the Mail article I wrote about on Left Foot Forward on Friday.

The true cost of Labour tax grab: small print reveals the extent of pain for workers

Yet read the story more closely and you find that these workers all earn over £150,000 a year.

Even better, the article then goes on to describe budget winners and losers.

• Winners: first time buyers, ISA savers, Entrepeneurs, Young Families, Pensioners, Drivers
• Losers: big property buyers, inheritance tax, drinkers and smokers, offshore evaders, company car drivers

Not a bad balance I’d say.

More seriously what is also clear from much the budget comment is the structural deficit is significantly smaller than people thought. (Much of the deficit is simply due to the recession – the tax take falls and benefit payments rise. When the economy recovers these effects will disappear and what is left is the structural deficit – the tax  proceeds of the imaginary bubble which we will not get back.)

This lack of precision about the size of the structural deficit must be another reason to avoid trying to close it prematurely.