Was the general election a vote against austerity? I was on the Today programme this morning to discuss this point, and in the course of the interview said that the lowest-paid did best under the Cameron years. This raised some degree of incredulity from Twitter, reported by Huffington Post. What planet am I on? I thought I’d answer.
The Cameron years were tough, especially for those on welfare. But the aim was always to make people better-off by moving them into work. David Cameron did cut tax for employers, with corporation tax far lower. Liam Byrne, with whom I was on the Today programme, said that companies hoarded cash – but he didn’t say that they also employed a lot more people than they used to. So while 442,000 public sector positions were cut, 3.51 million private sector positions were created: the economy created eight jobs for every one shed by government.
This matters because government cannot create jobs: every penny paid to a public sector worker needs to be taken from the economy in tax.
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