Wonderful Polly

Excellent logic again today:

The Institute for Fiscal Studies thought Brown had put enough money into tax credits to keep the poverty figures at least steady. It's unclear what went wrong, but earnings rose higher than expected, so tax credits didn't keep up.

So, the fact that the majority of people saw their incomes rise is in fact a bad thing. Better to be more equal than wealthy.

The low-paid self-employed reported no improvement in their earnings - but the Treasury suspects widespread cheating; anyone who has ever been asked to pay cash for services or repairs in their home knows how common it is.

Oh, and anyway, people are lying about their incomes so the figures aren't really true anyway.

Of course Gordon Brown can recover both issues for Labour before the next election, but both need extraordinarily heavy lifting at a time of spending retrenchment.

But we must spend lots of money anyway, despite the previous two facts. BTW, worth noting that those are in fact consecutive sentences in her piece: I've just changed the order.

Timing is all: why does the Office for National Statistics produce poverty figures two years late?

Well, it could be because it takes time and money to collect and collate statistics. There's another explanation, of course, that bureaucracies aren't very swift at such things, but then that's not something Polly would want to hear.

It can't all be done by tax credits. Most of the poor are in work, so the minimum wage needs to rise, with no more cheap labour. This year the minimum wage only level-pegged, despite no sign whatever that it is damaging jobs - on the contrary, 2m more jobs have been created. If wages were higher, the tax-payer could spend less on tax credits.

This is entirely stupid. Marginal tax and benefit withdrawal rates (which she alludes to, tax credit payments go down when the minimum wage goes up) can mean that a £1 raise in wage income leads to a 9 pence rise in total income. A rise in the minimum wage is therefore likely to do very little at all to reduce poverty and at least in most economic models will increase it by reducing the amount of low skill labour required by businesses.

With inequality rising, it is now time the rich paid more. The 1.5% who earn over £100,000 can afford a top slice from their earnings.

Sigh. There's no certainty that an increase in taxation upon the highly paid and highly mobile will in fact increase tax revenues. The Laffer Curve really is true at times and in some places.

It will take great political campaigning, as there is no public clamour for this programme. DWP minister Jim Murphy says he gets more letters from his constituents on Spanish donkeys and circus elephants than on child poverty - and Britain doesn't even have any circus elephants.

So the Demos doesn't actually care about this? So we should still spend all the money? Are we in fact a democracy or should spending priorities be determined by a newspaper columnist?

That shocking Unicef report was useful. Never mind if the figures were a bit extreme, no one denies that the UK comes near last on every measure of children's wellbeing.

Err, actually, many did disagree vehemently with that report.

Until now, the very word "inequality" has been banned from the political lexicon. But now the wealth gap is widening, Labour has to confront it. In the last decade every £100 increase in GDP growth has seen £40 go to the richest 10% of the people: the other 90% have had to share out the rest - and this pattern is accelerating.

So everyone is getting richer then? It isn't the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Excellent, isn't this what we actually want?

Where people stand in the social pecking order ordains their mental and physical health, their happiness and their wellbeing.

Oh dear. It is true that the social pecking order determines such things, but it isn't true that income equality would solve them. For even if we had total income equality, we'd just have a different social pecking order.

No nation has significantly cut child poverty without reducing inequality too.

And that is blazingly obvious as a statement. If you start out by defining child poverty as relative poverty, then of course solving child poverty requires reducing inequality.

If you defined child poverty as absolute  poverty of course then the statement is nonsense. We have not reduced inequality in the UK (as Polly says, we're back to 1961 when the figures were first calculated) and we have no absolute child poverty.

But of course, if Polly says we should spend lots more money on something that Polly alone worries about then we'd all just better pay up, shouldn't we?