Tuesday, March 08, 2011

IDS simplifies further... but will Osborne follow on personal taxation?

Simplification. Iain Duncan-Smith clearly "gets it". Instead of a multitude of benefits, many mean-tested, there really ought o be just single schemes that are universal but that are also not so extravagant that they either (a) encourage you to stay sitting on your arse and not work, or (b) penalise you for having the audacity to work and save for your old age.

Those are the two situations currently, and it seems in the case of the latter now, Iain Duncan-Smith is making proposals to simplify the pension system so as to address the complete mess left by Labour that punished saving and made the poor poorer through the complexity of the system.

Naturally, I would expect such changes to be opposed by the lefties, and I imagine they'll do so on the basis that to scrap the pension credit system will mean putting all the people processing such forms out of work. After all, that is the real driver behind most of the credit system. The credit system is the proverbial Keynesian hole that the state employ men to dig and men to fill.

Anyhow, seeing as Iain Duncan-Smith "gets it" on the matter of simplification,when will George Osborne finally "get it" on the matter of simplifying the personal tax system?

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