Government finances and spending

On current forecasts, public spending will take the same proportion of national income in 2017–18 as it did in 2003–04. But it will be being spent on quite different things.

Stuart Adam writes in the Financial Times, February 2013.

With exactly one month to go until the Budget, IFS and the Institute for Government are holding a joint event on how tax policy might be better made. In this observation, Paul Johnson, IFS director, reflects on why we still have a long way to go in designing a more coherent tax system and why the current policymaking process may be partly to blame.

Presentation given to a joint ministerial stakeholder event in Cardiff, 18th February 2013.

In a speech in Bedford today, the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, has proposed reintroducing a 10% income tax rate on a narrow band of income, to be paid for by a new ‘mansion tax’ on residential properties worth more than £2 million. In this observation, IFS researchers explain why there are better alternatives to both of these policies that would have similar distributional effects.

Presentation given at the launch of the IFS Green Budget, 6 February 2013