If the government makes ‘savings’ of £1million, what does it actually save?  Well, by savings we mean job cuts, and almost all of the job cuts are from lowly paid workers.

A person on (say) £12000 a year will pay £673 in tax and NI contribution.  They now do not have a job and so will receive (at least) jobseekers allowance of £73.1 a week, or the equivalent of £3801 a year.  So the immediate saving is not £12000 but £7525 a year.

But someone on a low income will not be saving, but spending their money to live.  The government will therefore lose VAT on their spending, let’s say on average 15%.  Applied to £7525 a year this reduces the saving to £6397.

On top of that, anything that they buy will add to the profits of the business who sell them the product – and the business will be paying tax on the profit. The business will employ someone to get the product to them and serve them – and that person is paying tax too.

So for every £1million that the government claims to cut the saving is probably only half at best.

In terms of human suffering this seems to me to be a very cruel and inefficient way of balancing the books.  Surely it is better to increase the contributions from the wealthy who will not suffer any hardship, but simply see a reduction in the amount of money that they squirrel away?