UK inflation stays low
The annual inflation rate in the United Kingdom was 1.9 percent in the year to March 2019, unchanged from the previous month and below market expectations of 2 percent.
Key facts:
Key facts:
- With wages rising at their fastest pace in over a decade, above inflation, and taxes cut for millions we are helping people to keep more money in their pockets.
- On top of this we are helping people with the cost of living by boosting the earnings of the lowest paid with an increase in the National Living Wage and freezing fuel duty for the ninth year in a row – saving the average car driver £1,000 by 2020.
- Labour don’t know how to handle the economy and offer only bogus solutions that will hurt the people they claim to help. More debt, higher taxes and fewer jobs would hit ordinary working people just as they did when Labour were last in power.
Comments
It quite simply is not saving them anything, for it to be a saving there needs to be a cut. Honestly could you imagine the backlash if British gas launched an advert campain saying we thought about raising everyones gas bill by 100% but we did not.
British Gas - delivering half price energy to your home.
Your comment that "inflation is a tax" is not completely wrong but it isn't completely right - or, more to the point, applicable in this case - either.
Inflation above very low levels is indeed harmful, and it has the effect of arbitrarily helping some people and reducing the real income of others.
Governments and taxes are ironically in both camps because different taxes are affected in three different ways by inflation.
Some types of tax such as income tax (unless you "Rooker-Wise" tax allowances and increase them in line with inflation) do indeed grab more money in both cash and real terms and as a proportion of national wealth because of inflation and this is the large kernel of truth in your "inflation is a tax" statement.
Flat percentage taxes (for example, VAT on anything supplied by businesses much larger than the VAT threshold) are inflation neutral in real terms - they raise more money by exactly the same amount as inflation devalues it.
Flat rate taxes such as some excise duties including taxes on petrol and diesel fuel, however, will drop in real terms as a result of inflation if they have been frozen which is why the "inflation is a tax" point doesn't really apply to fuel duty.
But to be completely honest Jim, can you imagine any organisation whatsoever which levies a p[rice, charge or tax on something and, if it had frozen that charge for nine years and not increased it, wouldn't boast about the fact?
Taxes on fuel, and the price of fuel most of which goes on tax, are already high in this country.
So the government decided that the price of fuel was already quite high enough to encourage people to use alternatives where that is reasonably practical and that there was no need to clobber firms and individuals (especially in remote and rural areas like most of Cumbria) even harder by putting the tax up even higher.
That isn't a "sod the planet" approach it's a "Don't crucify rural areas" approach.