Well, we now have the details of the budget. The key headlines are that the Government are going to increase state benefits, especially by ending the two child cap on child benefit. This was widely floated and no surprise.
Some of the rhetoric against the move was concerning with questions along the lines of “I wonder who benefits?”. The obvious answer is that it is parents if three children or more children. However, I don’t think that this is what they were getting at.
Mind you, there was plenty if bizarre rhetoric from the left claiming that the cap was some great cruelty. It wasn’t. It simply is not the case that some children were being punished due to their situation, that some injustice was being committed. I guess this is the problem when a state benefit is seen as a right. It is simply a case of the government choosing to allocate finite resources.
Now, the Chancellor is arguing that this measure will raise 450,000 out of poverty. I’m not convinced it will. I’m not convinced that unique handouts like this do that. Better surely to bring in measures that raise living standards by enabling more people into work and cutting their bills. More of which shortly.
But the other side of the coin was that benefit increases were accompanied by the freezing if tax thresholds and a number of eye watering tax increases including the introduction of tax onto personal pension contributions. At the same time we were told that this was a budget to improve the cost of living.
Here is a basic point. If you raise the tax burden then you have not cut the cost of living. You have added to it. Every tax increase does that because you make it more expensive for people to work, for people to produce goods and services and therefore to pay bills. In fact, this is one reason as to why there has been a cost of living problem and why people have not felt the benefits of what has been a significant period of economic growth over the past 15 years. If you want to deal with the cost of living crisis, you need to see that growth feed into a reduction in the tax burden (not just individual tax cuts), into lower inflation and into real terms wage increases.
Here is the take home for Christians. We knock politics because we don’t think we are meant to be political. However, really, it’s just about thinking about wisdom for everyday life. Further, we need to be wary about being party political. My views here are shaped first by my Christian faith. I believe that concern for the poor and vulnerable is an important Biblical value. It’s part of living my neighbours. However, so too would Christians on the left. The political bit is about attempting to work out how we put those values into practice.
Faithroots 