So deep was the fiscal crisis that the government slashed taxes on low and middle income workers

That would be committing to the triple lock for at least another few decades

In order to save any meaningful amount of money, a means test would effectively be a tax targeted at middle income pensioners. If you want to claw back the cost of the pension in a progressive way you should increase tax that will continue to affect the richest pensioners not means test

Freezing of thresholds since has somewhat reversed this but in 2020 average tax rates including Plan 2 student loan repayments (the loans that will mostly never get paid off and so more plausibly defined as taxes) were lower for the median employee than at any point in history even before loans

Tbf for the median earner it’s about 3pp more and it’s a kinder student loan system than US/Canada IMO

And UC shows the inherent trade offs you face with marginal rates. Lowering the taper rate has just drawn more and more people into benefits, extending high marginal rates to more households and making it more expensive to increase generosity at the bottom end

I agree they both matter but I’m not exercised in terms of it high marginal rates being inherently unfair more just distortionary

The policy is stupid and child benefit should just be universal again but IMO the problem is incentives at those points rather than distributive justice/fairness given no one below 100k actually gets more than half their income taxed

It’s got lower since charge got spread out over 20k (which I’m not convinced is better) c.54% for 2 children or 63% with a student loan as well

Seems odd that the bump is just over 50k because to me the biggest disincentive is not so much the actual marginal rate but the cognitive load of doing the tax return

Between country inequality is stark but I don't think there's evidence it has risen in the last 40-50 years wir2022.wid.world/chapter-2/

Article says that *temporary accommodation* accounts for over 80% of homelessness, not the UK (which would be absurd)

Not really sure what the balancing of rights and responsibilities has to do with it. Voting is a right and a responsibility. All of the things you name are similar. So your argument is more that you should get the rights and responsibilities in different spheres of life at exactly the same time

Alas still not yet the old version

Completely agree

That's fair particularly re:Economist usage. But in the UK at least there is only one far right party of significance and think you'd be hard pressed to argue it's extreme right. So I'm not sure it's really substituting for the umbrella term, more just a new way of describing Reform specifically

I get that but if the most precise term (PRR) is less stigmatising than the term the media uses, can it really be said to be sanitising them?

While it is obviously annoying to us academics when the media use lazy terminology (in my field '2-child benefit cap' really winds me up), is 'hard right' more sanitised than 'populist radical right'? Right wing media are always using hard left as an insult