Raising the personal tax allowance is a great idea. Too many low income earners are paying tax at the same time as receiving benefits - needlessly pouring tax money into the leaky Treasury bucket. But as ever, how to fund the tax break is the £64bn question.
This change brings the opporuntity to begin trimming many public spending programmes to make them more narrowly targeted. As a result, taxpayers will begin to trust the government to cut taxes rather than merely cut public spending.
Currently, there are many cases where the link between the burden of a tax and how the money is spent is unnecessarily indirect. This is no accident. As explained previously by Kristian Niemietz, the proponents of 'tax and spend' deliberately design policy and related spending programmes to favour a proportion of undeserving recipients without appearing to tax them directly. These are usually called 'universal' or 'comprehensive' programmes. This political strategy not only preys on greed amongst the 'sharp-elbowed' middle class, so that they'll welcome the policy behind the spending; but it also preys on their fear that abandoning the policy and cutting spending will not
translate into lower middle class taxes.
On that basis, the government only ever spends more, and either borrows or raises taxes to do so - a vicious circle we need to break.
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