Originally Posted by Damien

They can grasp it.

This is all confected outrage. When we talk of workers we generally think of people whose income comes from their direct labour. People on salaries or self-employed.

We don't think of people who gain passive income from investments.

No honest person is that confused about this and thinks they're not workers because they own a few thousand pounds worth of shares or they have some savings gaining interest. When we talk of class in this country this divide is now probably the most important one, the answer to the question of if you need to work or not.

There is plenty to criticise about this budget regarding workers, i.e increasing the employers' NI contributions will indirectly tax workers. You can argue Labour never should have made this promise at all and instead should reverse last year's NI cut because it was never budgeted for in the first place. You could also argue that by far the biggest tax increase in tomorrow's budget will be that the tax bands are once again being frozen pushing more people into the higher tax bands despite inflation eroding the values of those salaries. An honest budget would go back to last year's NI rate and tell everyone upfront about the freezing of the bands. The tax burden on the middle-class is already very high so there isn't much scope to increase it beyond those measures anyway.

But instead of those substantive points, we get this disingenuous nonsense. Just liars everywhere arguing fiction between each other. This budget is a tax increase on workers, the last Tory budget was an tax increase on workers, it's needed because the economy has no growth and nobody is confused what workers mean.