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http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Where_we_stand/Universities_and_Skills.aspx
I’ve noticed that one of the Conservatives plans for University Tuition fees is to create an early repayment bonus on student loans. Surely this would only benefit students who are already rich enough to be able to pay back student loans. Would this not be a regressive benefit scheme when the money paid out for this could be focused more on lowering Tuition Fees or funding places?
The level of Government debt accumulated in the last 2 years is largely as the result of the unnecessary bailout of reckless `financial wizards’ with a `heads we win, tails you lose’ attitude towards their gambles with other people’s money. These people are more than likely to be tories.
The strictures to be applied to Government spending will mainly be targeted at the livelihoods of the huddled masses at the bottom of the heap. These people should entail the vast majority of the Socialist core vote.
Is it any surprise that so many now say that they intend to vote BNP?
Hi – I have started a new political blog with an anti-racism slant and think it may be especially interesting to Labour readers. It is based entirely on reality. Thankyou.
I love the ideals expressed in the “About” section of your site, but the tone of all the comments are complete biased against the Tories. I’m not sure that this qualifies you as non-partisan… Pity, I’d love to follow a genuinely unbiased site.
Let me know if you see any way to get back to your openly expressed principles.
PS: I’m an immigrant!
I find the argument that the Lib-Dem proposal to raise the threshold for paying income tax to 10,000 is regressive is tendentious. The graphic showing the rise in weekly income as a function of income decile completely misses the point. A far better dependent variable to plot would be the *fractional* rise in weekly income (i.e. change in income divided by the income before the change) — this would tell a very different story and, is I think, in line with the reasoning behind the policy. This alternative graphic would show that proportionately the lower paid benefit more from this approach. To illustrate what I mean: if my income is 300 pounds a week and I gain an extra 30 – that would be a 10 percent improvement (i.e. very noticeable and significant), but if my income was 1500, the same weekly increase is a mere 2 percent and I doubt I would notice it. If the real point is that you don’t see income tax as a progressive tax – or that you think the LibDems are not going far enough (e.g. they should lower the thresholds for higher rates of tax to save the embarrassment of some proportionately tiny tax gains for middle income earners), then come out and say that. Lifting the tax threshold for the poorest in society *has* to be a good and just thing.