Budget punch

[kyaume]

``We are all in it together''.

On Monday, the secretary general of the OECD, Angel Gurria, addressing the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, delivered a remarkable warning about rising inequality and the damage it does. He is not some socialist ideologue, but the head of a historically conservative organisation that traditionally preaches free markets and state austerity. However, recently the OECD has become alarmed at what is happening within the western societies it monitors, the soaring inequality and dysfunctional social fracture.

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Here's how he concludes: "There's nothing inevitable about high and growing inequality." Different paths chosen by similar OECD economies over decades tell that story. Nations can choose to be high tax, high social service, high social solidarity nations like the Nordics or they can choose to be the devil-take-the-hindmost US. Britain is heading down the American path. People may not choose it, but bogus austerity economics has been heavily deployed to pretend there is no alternative.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...get-inequality

And this is what he got as an answer from this most privileged of all governments (at its inception, 23 of the 29 members of government were millionaires):

A budget for Tory blowhards and Redwood dreamers

Forget mugging grannies, George Osborne's 50p rate gamble reveals a naked yearning for the glory days of Thatcher

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The 50p tax cut marks a political milestone – or a millstone. If people absorb nothing else about what David Cameron and George Osborne did, they will remember this. Mugging grannies was just an added blunder: they were supposed to be too dim to notice when he tried to disguise a cut as a "simplification". It was not just every Tory front-page headline, it was school-gate talk the next day. Mugging the old to reward the millionaires will stay ingrained in the public imagination on election day. Though here's the irony on the granny tax: had Osborne not been stealthy but honest he could have made a good case for his "simplification", as the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows pensioner households are still least hard hit. It's a measure of his political recklessness to throw away the care he previously lavished on older voters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...edwood-dreamer

[LeeInChicago]

what is OECD?

[kyaume]

Originally Posted by LeeInChicago

what is OECD?

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development