Meanwhile, we cheerfully announce that savings of £20bn can be plucked out of the air, and that it’s OK to work out later on where it is all going to come from. Does this make us look like serious people for serious times?

I accept that we were absolutely right to put an ocean of clear water between us and Labour. Now let’s have the sense to row back on the flaky overclaims and overcommitments, before we make ourselves look ridiculous.

Yes, we should regularly make a fuss when we see Labour wasting money. Today’s story that Labour wants to rebuild every secondary school in the country on the cheap by 2020 is another example. Let’s build fewer schools, and (unlike CLASP schools) build them to last.

But let’s be honest. We will need savings, first and foremost, to make room for massive investment (whether public or private) in low-energy transport and housing infrastructure. We may have to choose between tax cuts and effective action on climate change. We know which has to come first. Don’t we?

the absolute priority of basic rate personal allowances being raised rather than marginal rates. While £500 is identical to a cleaner on £14k and a banker on £114k proportionately one is greater than the other and will definately be noticed more by one than the other.”

It comes down to the same question. Are tax cuts to be directed to the poor, or to most of the population?

I think if the party conference is to make any sensible decision about these proposals, it needs to know – in general terms – how the tax cuts are going to be distributed among different income groups.

And it also needs to know – in general terms – where the spending cuts are going to come from, what impact there will be on public services, and how that impact will be distributed between different income groups.

It would be an odd situation if Labour and the Lib Dems were advocating tax cuts, while the Conservatives were hinting at the possibility of tax rises, as Cameron has been today.

the absolute priority of basic rate personal allowances being raised rather than marginal rates. While £500 is identical to a cleaner on £14k and a banker on £114k proportionately one is greater than the other and will definately be noticed more by one than the other.

I think (please correct me) mnimum wage is £5.56 Ph. Multiplied by a 37 our week and 52 weeks thats £ 10697.44 pa salary.

If we are really serious about using tax cuts for a fairer society then setting that as the basic allowance would be a “direction of travel” would be the best start. Off the top of my head I don’t know how much that would cost or how far our £20bn would go but it would be a big start.

Conference amendment any one ?

Of course, to a statistician “average” can mean either mean or median (or even mode). But whatever sense it’s used in, with reference to the distribution of wages, “average and low” is going to include at least half the working population.

Can I just remind people what it was again?

Kevin wrote:
“I think scrapping these pointless schemes and using the money to directly improve the lives of low paid workers … is politically expedient, economically sound and morally laudabe.”

And I responded:
“But that’s not what is being proposed. The spending cuts are to fund tax cuts for “ordinary families”. This BBC report specifies “lower and average earners””

If the BBC report is accurate, then clearly the policy is not as Kevin described.

“Lower and average earners” is clearly quite different from “low paid” workers. To argue with that on the basis that it’s difficult to know where to draw the line is like saying green is the same as blue, because it’s difficult to know exactly what wavelength divides them.

If the BBC report is an invention or an error, then we’re left with “ordinary families”, not “the low paid”. I’d suggest that if the authors of the document wanted to convey “the low paid”, then “ordinary families” was a very strange choice of words.

But perhaps it’s just one of those phrases that can mean all things to all men.

To give a flipside example, someone earning 7k in Gwent is likely to have, by many scales, a more satisfactory time of it than someone earning 7k in London, and yet they would both derive exactly the same benefit from our tax policy, whether it was this one or one more to Anon’s liking (whatever that might be). There’s nothing definitive about categories like “poor” and “average”, hence my illustrations and hence why no taxation system which seeks fairness should take the blindest bit of notice of them.

Entirely in agreement about the linguistics of the doc. But then it isn’t really aimed at us, is it.

To possibly anticipate you, David, the bit I don’t understand is why helping the majority of the working population through lower taxes is a significantly worse thing from a liberal fair taxation perspective than giving more help to a minority. Like I say, I could have done with that extra penny being weighted at the bottom of the earning scale. But I think Anon is setting up an artificial dichotomy. I would have wanted the extra penny on the PA no matter what the final figures were and so, I guess, would Anon.

what “variability” is there to average earnings? Its a precise mathmatical term. If you want to take personal circumstances into account then you’d need to go for a tax credit system. labour didn’t want to help everyone they wanted to help the working poor and people with children. hence the nightmarish comlexity and means testing.

If we as liberals use the income tax system it will be easier , simplier, cheap but more scater gun.

Anyway because the document only uses “struggling” and “ordinary” this entire discussion, my contributions included, is pointless because frankly we don’t know what it means.

2. Do you know any figures to suggest that the majority of the working population is actually above whatever we term as “low-paid”? I mean, I genuinely don’t but if we assume half the working population earning £23k I suppose that’s about 15m people. Assuming they are distributed roughly evenly along a hypothetical scale from £0 to £23k, that gives you 652,174 people within each ’000 block. That means you can take out the 3,913,044 people who don’t pay any tax at all because they’re under the personal allowance. That leaves 11,086,956 people from the very poorest taxpayers up to the average earner. At what point do you draw the line? If you help the poorest million of those people and do something else with the rest of your savings, why on earth is that significantly better for a liberal party that helping the poorest million and the next poorest, say five million as well? Or the next poorest three million after that?

I introduce all these over-precise figures to try and show how dividing people into “low-paid” and “average” and suggesting that there is some definitive gulf between them is a nonsense. You are talking about a block of adjacent people with, to a greater or lesser extent, similar financial problems and priorities and which ones you choose to help is just a question of how much money you’ve got, not an abstract moral decision about “only” helping the truly “poor”. If you cut a tax, it affects everyone (as is liberal).

I would also suggest you are imputing magical qualities to the act of earning an “average” salary which do not, in fact, pertain (see (1)).

3. Following on from 2, I still don’t understand what you mean by “entirely different” where the context is a fairer taxation system. Currently, the poorest people pay the highest proportion of their income in tax, and the richest people pay the lowest. In between is a sliding scale of fairness/unfairness. Again, where do you draw the line? This person is unfairly taxed, but that person is less unfairly taxed, therefore we shall call them fairly taxed? My point being, I suppose, that just as the scale is sliding, so is the solution. It’s not the either/or choice you’re implying. We *haven’t* taken one decision to help the poorest million, then a separate decision to help the other ten million.

FTR, I would much rather we spent a penny of our basic rate cut on raising the personal allowance, but doubtless if that had been done, I would just have wanted another penny.

If you’re giving tax cuts to people on average earnings, that is going to include the majority of the working population. Obviously that is entirely different from directing tax cuts only towards the low-paid.

Very true – then suppose the £23k already included a tax credit entitlement? My point was only that what constitutes a reasonable living wage is dependent on a lot of factors, children being one, area of the country being another etc.

I suppose what I really mean is that I don’t see what it is about the phrase “low and average” which can be pinned down so precisely that anyone can definitively say that a policy aimed at “low and average” workers is less beneficial to the notion of fairer taxation than a policy aimed at “low-paid workers”. The categories are so difficult to define anyway that the exercise is like pinning jelly to the wall. Unless someone’s going to actually dress it up with some figures, it seems like a duff argument to me.

The single parent would however get around an additional £5k in tax credits and child benefit which you’d need to factor into the equation.

(Assuming they claim them – I’m not supporting the tax credits system – it seems a little pointless taking c.£5k in tax and NI just to give it back! But earnings don’t necessarily equate to income).

Average, obviously.

“I think scrapping these pointless schemes and using the money to directly improve the lives of low paid workers … is politically expedient, economically sound and morally laudabe.”

But that’s not what is being proposed. The spending cuts are to fund tax cuts for “ordinary families”. This BBC report specifies “lower and average earners”:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7510909.stm“

Is it the “ordinary families” bit that you think contradicts the low-paid workers aspect? If so, I might have some sympathy, as family-talk has always struck me as facile, not to say alienating.

But there doesn’t seem to me to be a whole lot of clear water between “low-paid workers” and “low and average” earners in the way that you suggest. I don’t think we’re really talking about two entirely different sets of people. The “average” salary is around £23k, but no-one would suggest that a single parent keeping three children on £23k was vastly better off than a single childless person living on £14k. So an “average” living wage obviously shifts depending on who it’s meant to keep. Note, incidentally, that “average” is the BBC’s gloss on our document. We don’t mention the word anywhere, unless you take “ordinary” to mean the same thing, which in statistical terms it obviously doesn’t.

Who is it you think is implicated in “low and average” who isn’t also implicated in “low paid”? I can think of several groups this might apply to – notably a young single worker on £23k – but I can’t see any obvious reason why the fact that our policy helps them should devalue the fairer taxation principle.

Well, if you didn’t understand that as an expression of the extreme unlikelihood of Brown calling an election before 2010, I think you were the only one.

But if your final sentence means we’re to be spared further nonsensical arguments of this kind, it can only be good news!

I was objecting to you painting anyone who thought an election could happen as being so barmy they are on another planet. It is a shame you again chopped someone’s words out of context to make your point.

I think you have made my point that debating with you isn’t possible as you are not willing to listen to what other people are actually saying.

End of contributions.