Some quick 'back of an envelope' maths tells me that with the new job, instead of driving the Camaro, I can spend about £800 on a soft top 205 that'll do about 40mpg around town and save money over the year, leaving the Camaro for high days and holidays.
Hmm.

I was not knocking this budget as particularly bad, in fact I suspect it was pretty neutral, giving no more away than raised elsewhere. Though I suspect that there are some giveaways to the rich in the details. I will find out when I get IFS analysis of this budget.

The increase in the personal allowances is good as is the petrol duty cut, but if you look at the other impacts on family income inflation and VAT increases the average person is still several hundred pounds worse because their wages have not kept pace with inflation. The duty cut will not even make up for the increase in VAT on petrol as a result of the recent increases because of the revolutions in the Middle east.

I was commenting more about the attitude of the public in general. Also the tax hikes on the rich are incredibly long overdue. They were the main beneficiaries of the last thirty year boom. The vast majority and that includes practically everyone here is probably not much better off than they were a decade ago. Their wages might be higher but so are the costs of living. Years ago it was not unfeasible for someone in their twenties on their own to actually buy their own home. Now it is late thirties and only earlier if the bank of mum and dad assist, and even then still needs two incomes. So are we any better off? In the US some 80% of the gains of the last thirty years have been grabbed by the top 1%. The rest are no better off than their parents in the seventies and in many ways are much worse off. The same could be said of here.

For those that have not had a pay increase during the last five years of which two were still booming are considerably worse off because they are paying for the costs of the boom yet probably never benefited either. The only protection you would have had was if the tax allowances had been indexed.

Also as for attacks on the unemployed I will accept that there are those that should not be getting help but they are probably far fewer than even the Daily Mail think there are. What about genuine economic black-spots? Is everyone expected to up and move to another area looking for jobs? Also if they do what do you honestly think the impact will be in your area if a large number turned up in your town? It would stretch social services and housing initially driving up rents and house prices, then schools would be overcrowded and hospital services would suffer until the teachers and medical staff also moved from the depressed areas. It would drive down wages in your area as there would be many more applicants available for work. In simple your standard of living would fall.

They should have left petrol duty as it was and knocked 2p of diesil duty instead. That would help businesses more.
I'm with teh cust in corproation tax though. The UK was becoming unattractive for foreign companies.
We still need to do more to cut red tape though.

A load of hot air surrounding a little fact Osborne tried not to mention, growth is continually falling.

Oh and the 1p off petrol crap, swallowed up by the increase in VAT. The total taxation charges vs tax breaks for us amount to, wait for it, 0% over each year of the current Parliament.

Gobsh!te. It's not working.

It'll be interesting to see if it actually makes any difference TBH; we already had one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the developed world, much lower than the USA, and lower than/competitive with our European neighbours.

Except Ireland though they were touting themselves as a tax haven for businesses wanting to trade within Europe, with their 12% corporation tax rate.

Ireland is hardly a major economy. It just can't compete with any of the "big four" economies of Europe, it doesn't have the workforce, the infrastructure, the capital etc.

It's not working yet.
They always knew there would be a drop before sustained growth. Even by their own estimates when they came to power, the number of jobless would be the same at the end of the parliament as at the start. There would be a spike in unemployment to start with (and a corrisponding dip in the economy) as public sector worker got laid off, before the private sector created jobs in the years to come.

It can't possibly be expected to work yet. We are in quite a jam, after all.

They were doing rather well until the financial crisis. Overtaking the UK in terms of GDP per capita quite significantly. According to the world bank in 2010 US$45,642 versus US$36,298 for the UK. They were certainly building the infrastructure and had the capital. On every measure they were doing better than the UK. Sure they are a minor economy but then so are many others within Europe.

Indeed.
I think people forget that and expect the fixes to work overnight. It could easily be a decade before the economy is healthy again, and that's assuming Labour don't get in at the next election and cock it up again.

And what's the GDP per capita now?

You simply can't compare a £1.5 trillion pound economy with one that's worth around £150bn. It's like comparing a 42" TV to a 14" portable one.

With all due respect, that was all entirely a false picture. They patently didn't have the capital as has been subsequently proved and, frankly, anyone whose travelled around Ireland knows the infrastructure is pretty centralised - you get much out of Dublin and it's pretty much all rural, by overall UK standards.

Dublin and it's suburbs is the equal of pretty much any city in the UK. However the rest of the RoI isn't the equivalent of the rest of the UK, and that's where the comparison falls down.

I will accept that the infrastructure outside Dublin might not have been as good, but then it does have a much lower population density than most of Britain. Pretty much the largest concentration of the population were in and around Dublin. Its main failure was the guarantees of the banks, which they like our government allowed to get too large in respect to the rest of the economy. It was more unbalanced than ours. They like Iceland tried to use Financial services to grow their way out of poverty. It back fired on them quite significantly. In fact in order to deal with the crisis they have slashed their services to the bone, and practically driven tens of thousands to emigrate. Longer term the Irish economy has been savagely weakened by the mass emigration. That has not happened here. Before the crisis Ireland could have borrowed even more cheaply than the UK. It is very different now.

An unsustainable and ludicrous property boom was a major issue too, though that could be argued to be a symptom rather than a cause. The whole thing was built on sand, rather like our own boom.