Further to this, I emailed David Phillips, the IFS expert quoted in the original story, and asked him whether the conclusion that households are ‘worse off’ than in 1997 only held if you ignored the rather salient fact that their incomes had increased significantly over the same period. He replied
You are correct - and this was explained in detail and repeatedly to the journalist who ran the story originally …
I don’t know what’s more worrying - that Elizabeth Colman thinks it’s okay to lie to Sunday Times readers, or that she thinks Sunday Times readers are too stupid to object....
Elizabeth Colman in the Times:
The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) has scrutinised all tax reforms in Labour’s budgets — and concluded its changes have left the average family where both parents work £1,283 a year immediately worse off than in 1997.
That’s only looking at the effects of taxes and benefits, isn’t it? Factor in wage increases under Labour and households are considerably better off than they were in 1997....
For Immediate Release
India: Stop ‘Social Cleansing' in Bangalore
Illegal Mass Evictions Against a Transgender Community
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(Berlin, November 10, 2008) - European governments should provide humanitarian protection to those Guantanamo detainees who will not be charged with a crime but cannot be returned to their countries of origin for fear of torture or other serious human rights violations, five leading human rights organizations said today.
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deportation,
torture,
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Unlawful Detention,
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The Wire is brilliant television, but there’s something I keep asking myself when watching it, though particularly the unremittingly bleak fourth season: Is Baltimore really this bad? Here are a few stats, with a comparison to London thrown in:
Baltimore lost 3% of its population between 2000 and 2006, while London gained about the same proportion.
14% of Baltimore’s housing units are vacant compared to about 3% of London’s.
On any given day, there are over 28,000 residents of Baltimore City who are incarcerated or under the supervision of probation or parole. That appears to be more than 4% of the total population. There aren’t any directly comparable figures for London but the total official capacity of its nine prisons is about 7,500, in a city more than...
Someone over at the Adam Smith Institute blog obviously hasn’t read the posting guidelines. Here’s Krish Batra:
Despite not being the ideal state education system, the US model has been enlighteningly successful in many ways … a lot of districts often utilize big proportions of their district property taxes to fund the local public schools, resulting in a lot of high-quality state schools around the country. In fact in some states like Iowa, the quality of the public education system is so high that private schools cannot even come close to competing, and the majority of students opt to go to public schools.
What is this crazy talk? Spend more on state schools and they get better? Spend enough and the private sector can’t compete?? My god, consider the...