George Osborne, born to a titled millionaire, has explained that he is cutting the tax-credits that let the working poor survive, despite the Tory party's election promise not to do any such thing — because it will reduce the deficit and therefore save them from the cuts that the country would have to pay in the future in order to pay down those debts.
Osborne did not moot the possibility of taxing the country's billionaires, including the "non-doms" who get to pretend that they live in an offshore tax-haven and duck their taxes. He also neglected to mention that countries are not companies, and that having a national bank and your own mint means that national debts are completely unlike the debts taken on by firms or households.
Osborne also didn't mention the possibility of taxing the companies that pretend that their profits are made in tax-havens and that all their UK income must be remitted to an offshore firm in nonsensical trademark licenses.
Finally, Osborne didn't mention the situation in which people working full-time jobs (or piecing together a full-time living from zero-hours contracts) can't afford to pay for rent and food for their families and require benefits to remain solvent enough to show up for work each day, meaning that the firms paying the sub-survival wages are getting a massive tax subsidy in the form of a fed and housed workforce that comes at tax-payers' expense.
Instead, Osborne explained that he would make the poorest workers in the UK even poorer, for their own benefit.
"Working people of this country want economic security, the worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford," the told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"That includes a tax credit bill that's gone up from the £1bn when it was introduced to the £30bn today. They are the people who will suffer. It's not about philosophy or theory: it's about the practical economic security of the people of this country.
"That tax credit bill would go up and up and up, the country couldn't afford it, people's economic security would be undermined, and the people who would suffer would be the very lowest paid in our country – they would be the people who would ultimately lose their work."
The low paid will suffer if I don't cut their tax credits, says George Osborne [Jon Stone/The Independent]
