I have to tip my hat to Civitas. The ‘Tufton Street’ think tank made quite a splash on Monday, including bagging the front page of the Daily Mail, with two striking claims.
One was that more than half of UK households now receive more in benefits from the government than they pay in tax. The other is that the top 10 per cent of earners pay more than half of all income tax.
Both headlines are correct, but a bit more analysis is needed to interpret these figures properly.
For a start, this is not new information. The Civitas report acknowledges that it is simply repackaging data which was first published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in July last year. The ONS revealed that the proportion of individuals receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes jumped from 47.5
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