Another of Labour's misleading comments about tax relates to the government and tax cuts for the rich. It is true that the government cut the top rate of tax to 45% from 50%. It is worth noting, however, that it was only at 50% for one month of the Labour Government from 1997-2010. However, if you want to look at how fair policies are then you need to take into account more than just income tax.
Unusually this government has done "distributional analyses" for policies. There is a distributional analysis that relates to the 2015 budget. That can be found:
here
This chart from it looks at the effects from June 2010 through to March 2015 by expenditure decile.
I prefer the expenditure analysis to look at the spending power of households which in many ways is a better indication of economic power than the formal income. You should note from this that the top 10% (the richer households) are paying a lot more in terms of tax than those lower down the expenditure analysis. Chart 2D in the document (which I have not extracted) does the same calculation by income decile and comes with the same conclusion (the rich are paying more tax as a percentage of income - notwithstanding the change in headline rate).
Unusually this government has done "distributional analyses" for policies. There is a distributional analysis that relates to the 2015 budget. That can be found:
here
This chart from it looks at the effects from June 2010 through to March 2015 by expenditure decile.
I prefer the expenditure analysis to look at the spending power of households which in many ways is a better indication of economic power than the formal income. You should note from this that the top 10% (the richer households) are paying a lot more in terms of tax than those lower down the expenditure analysis. Chart 2D in the document (which I have not extracted) does the same calculation by income decile and comes with the same conclusion (the rich are paying more tax as a percentage of income - notwithstanding the change in headline rate).
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