The things that affect me are:
• Alcohol taxes to go up 2% from midnight – putting the price of the average pint up 1p
No, I don’t drink pints, in fact I don’t drink much at all, but that occasional bottle of wine, bubbly or G&T will now be a tad more expensive….no big deal tbh.
• Fuel duty to rise by 2p per litre from September, then by 1p a litre above inflation each April for the next four years
Couldn’t see that one coming….if you have a car this will affect you so yeah, but my mileage is quite low so again no big deal.
• From next month until March 2010 motorists to get £2,000 discount on new cars if they trade in cars older than 10 years
Doesn’t affect me, but it might encourage the other half to finally ditch the jalopy that he calls a car!
Things that don’t affect me but I thought I’d comment on anyway!
• Income tax for those earning more than £150,000 to rise to 50% from April 2010
I wish I was earning enough to complain about it!
• £1.7bn extra funding for Job Centre network
Is that for all the people who are going to be made redundant? Cos they sure won’t be providing any more helpful advice than they do at the moment…..I’ll stop now before I sink into an angry rant!
• £250m funding to help people get work experience in growth industries
And what growth industries are these exactly? Training more carers for our aging population and those new job centre staff they’ll be taking on?
Given the state of the economy right now, I was disappointed that there wasn’t more to help the small businesses (or maybe I missed that, I haven’t looked in-depth yet). So far all the initiatives to help business are only any good for the medium size business, and little help to the very small businesses who are struggling right now.