Today's Awful Statement was just more Baby Boomer cherries on top of the Home-Owner-Ist cake.
There's been a flurry of measures over the past few months to ensure that wealth continues to trickle upwards from poor to rich, from the productive economy to landowners and from young to old recently, such as cranking up Help To Buy to ensure that today's buyers take out the largest mortgages possible, selling off student loans (with the implication that interest rates will be increased) and an effective veto on Council Tax increases.
But Osbrown really cranked it up today:
- a cap on working age welfare spending but current old age pensions guaranteed to rise faster than wages;
- an increase in the state pension age for everybody under 40 (i.e. for those who don't consider any major party worth voting for any more);
- shifting wind farm subsidies from onshore to offshore (offshore is even more expensive than onshore);
- just as a little consolation prize for the large landowners who were coining in the onshore wind farm subsidies, there will be tax breaks for fracking instead (which will be about as popular as onshore wind farms);
- more council house sell-offs (how many under-40s have a council house?);
- insurance companies to acquire infrastructure that should rightfully be nationally-owned;
- more subsidies for buy-to-let landlords;
- a Business Rates freeze to ensure that commercial landlords can push through higher rent increases in future;
- a paltry and gimmicky married couple's allowance (which will paid by the single and cohabiting);
- and just in case you weren't paying attention, the deficit is to stay at six or seven per cent of GDP for the time being, but no probe's there, those people who now have to work until they're seventy will have plenty of time to stump up the taxes to start repaying it, won't they?
None of this is a coincidence, is it?
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