Will George Osborne come ever clean about his successes? I caught up with the Chancellor in Leeds today and asked him about the Treasury’s role in the jobs miracle. I put it to him: isn’t it the case that he has decided to go slower on deficit reduction to support the jobs boom? The figures show that this is exactly what’s happened: the Treasury isn’t getting as much tax in because so much of the increase in employment is in low-paid jobs.
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Osborne has decided to cut these workers’ taxes, and even support their income through tax credits. You’d think a compassionate conservative would make a virtue of this and say something like:
‘Yes, the deficit is falling far more slowly than I intended. But are we paying more debt interest? No! Because a global bond bubble came along, and halved the rate of interest we had to pay. This gave us a bit more leeway, so we used it to support jobs by concentrating tax cuts for the low-paid.
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