George Osborne should come clean over who wins or loses in his budget
by Heather Stewart from on (#G625)
The chancellor seems increasingly willing to resort to 'fiddling the figures' - something for which he castigated Gordon Brown
When thousands of poor American families saw the homes they had loved and saved for seized by the banks in the depths of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it was scant comfort that they had only been able to afford to clamber on to the property ladder in the first place because of reckless lenders, toothless regulators and short-sighted politicians. Losing your home is losing your home.
Yet when George Osborne contemplates the cuts many households will face as a result of his planned reductions in tax credits - three million will lose 1,000 a year, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies - he wants to kid us, and maybe himself, that it doesn't matter because the state could ill afford such generosity to the needy in the first place.
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