Robin Hood tax for the rich
What do Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Robin Hood have in common?
Quite a lot according to the latest number crunchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies
As we can see from the charts above from the Independent, Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, all sourced from the IFS, that the three consecutive Labour governments have redistributed our wealth, from the very rich, to the very poor
At the Telegraph, the hardest part of the chart was choosing the right terminology
Transforming data into information, hard wonk speak into words that you and I can understand
He fares best from the above chartery?
Only you can judge... please do
Well, its got to be between the Independent and the Telegraph. Both have relevant figures (incomes) that mean something to the general reader, unlike the others that just state 'poorest - richest' or 'Income decile group' , leaving the reader having to do more research to finding out where they stand in the groupings
ReplyDeleteI think they are much of a muchness and for me they all miss the interesting point, namely how many people were affected in each category. The Telegraph headline that went with it mentions 10 million families losing out but there could be 25 million gaining - the graph doesn't show you one way or the other. The numbers gaining are the important bit, not the percentage gain, in an election year.
ReplyDeleteThe Daily Mail deserves a special mention for not only having no figures at all, bar the scale, but having the shiniest money pile. Lovely
Using the percentages as the dominant visual element (yes, lifted directly from a press-handout) obscures the much more interesting absolute numbers.
ReplyDeleteThe 'real' numbers are even in there at the top in the Independent. Look - The people in decile group 2 and 3 made a lot more than the poorest people. So I end up not trusting these graphics at all - I sense that they are made for political reasons with no real desire to serve me as the reader.
Also the fact, that the two papers who actually tries to put the household income in there, do so with different numbers is a bit discomforting ...
Looking again I see that the Guardian left off a bar entirely - the richest, on the right hand side. An oversight?
ReplyDeleteWell pointed out Ciaran - the money piles are Indeed, very shiney
ReplyDeleteThe bar at the ultimate right isn't really part of the same dataset with household income split in decile groups. That's why it's number eleven ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe +100K is more like a bonus-category to make sure to drive home a certain point - that the richest have lost the most under Labour.
GKN, you're right. I Wonder why the Guardian would make an editorial decision not to show that as their paper would be the one that most agreed with that policy.
ReplyDeleteYour blog is excellent by the way.