http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... p-rate-tax

He might want to see how his morals and notions of the lowest paid compare with those of IDS, never mind Labour.

I doubt he would even listen to any credible solutions. They are more interested in lowering the tax burden for their backers no matter what it did to the country.

As far as I was aware, the tories had previously stated that the 50% tax rate was useless, as the effect was actually to be an incentive to tax avoidance/evasion and it in fact brought in less revenue than when the rate was 45%, yes? I mean, we all heard that, right?

So if that's true, how can the 50% tax rate be a brake on the economy? Surely if you bring in the 45% tax rate and the actual tax revenue goes up, that has in fact taken money out of the economy and therefore to some degree has slowed it down, as there is less money for those being taxed to spend on goods and services, behaviour which causes the economy to grow and jobs to be created etc... Don't the tories always claim a low taxation economy is better? So if they reduce the 50% tax rate to 45% and get in more tax revenue, that's bad, isn't it?

They need to make their minds up.

What they failed to mention was that the cut was signposted very early and so very few actually got hit by the higher 50% rate. The banks brought forward bonuses to avoid the rate and then delayed the next payment until after the tax cut so missing it altogether. If they had not been in power then the tax rate would have raised significantly more. The fact that it was only in use for a single year made avoidance a damn certainty.