Graphs at a glance: Public spending cuts hit the many harder than the few, because the few can buy privately what is cut. But elections are decided by the many!

Defining who is very rich is not straightforward. Some with vast wealth have little income and live in poverty (for example, low income pensioners living in million pound London houses bought for a song decades ago). For this post we consider households with more income than 90% of households in the UK. Perhaps not all "rich", but certainly "richer than most". We use the Household Disposable Income data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). These ONS figures for 2013 show the top decile (top 10%) of households had 13.4 times...

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Rip-off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 26th March)

Britain's in love with borrowing again: Household debt hits record £9,000 and is growing at the fastest rate in a decadeThe figure, which does not include mortgages, soared by £20billion or nine per cent last year to hit £239billion, a report from PwC found. The situation will only get worse as interest rates start to rise, which will mean Britons will have to fork out an increasing proportion of their incomes on servicing their debts. What's more PwC projects unsecured borrowing will grow over the next two years between four per cent and six per...

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Osborne’s new rules allow you to cash in your annuity pension pot any time you like

SOURCE: A report by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (part of the University of Manchester and the Open University) observed: "the remarkable result is that under Mrs Thatcher from 1979-90, just as under Tony Blair from 1997-2007, the real value of Housing Equity Withdrawal is larger than the real value of GDP growth"OUR RELATED STORIES:Spending our property wealth led to the economic crash in 2008. Will Osborne’s new rules allowing us to spend our pension pots lead to another?OECD report shows greater inequality is bad for growth....

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Graphs at a Glance: Spending our property wealth led to the economic crash in 2008. What will spending our pension pots lead to?

Dickens' fictional optimist Mr. Micawber stated the secret to his happiness was to have an income larger than his expenditure. Dickensian optimistic fictionalist George Osborne devised a way to dodge this restriction of income threatening to stand in the way of his happiness. George conceived a way to lower our incomes (low pay recovery and welfare cuts) and yet increase our household expenditure (which since 2012 has been the basis of GDP growth, and therefore the foundation of Osborne's credibility and thus his happiness). In March...

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Rip-off News round-up. Our pick of the last week's media (Thu 19th March)

'Chronic underfunding' of social care increases burden on NHS, say GPsNine out of 10 GPs believe deep cuts to social care under the coalition have added to the growing overcrowding at both their own surgeries and hospital A&E units. In a poll of 830 family doctors in England, 92% did not think that enough social care is available to stop patients ending up in emergency departments or to avoid them having to stay in hospital despite being medically fit to leave. The Care and Support Alliance, which commissioned the poll, said “chronic underfunding”...

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"Lest We Forget" Banker Special: a review of continuing banker scandals the major parties have gone quiet about

As we all know, the country went into a tailspin following the collapse of the banks, both here and abroad. You can say what you like about the Tory LibDem government's attempts to turn the country around, and the opposition's criticism of it. But one thing is for sure. Whoever is paying for the crisis, it's clearly not our top bankers.In the first week of March the total pay of the CEOs of our largest banks was revealed. The boss of Lloyds, Antonio Horta-Osorio, got £11.5m, Stuart Gulliver at HSBC got £7.6m, and Barclays’ Antony Jenkins got £5.5m....

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