Of interest from last week's UK Budget

The bombshell from Gordon Brown's 2007 Budget speech, delivered last week;

Indeed to reward work, to ensure working families are better off, and to make the tax system fairer, I will from next April cut the basic rate of income tax from 22p down to 20p.

UK 2006/2007 rate of tax 0 - £2,150 10%

£2,151 - £33,300 22%

Over £33,300 40%

But he also abolished the 10 percent rate.....and raised National Insurance.

Of interest to me, however, is the increasing drive to eradicate child poverty. Here Patricia Morgan points out that the government is failing to get significant numbers of single mothers into work by on one hand paying them more if they work but on the other upping payments to their children which effectively makes working less attractive. She maintains that the focus on poor single parent families is breaking up poor two parent families who have not received the same financial assistance.

A couple with two children need to work 74 hours a week at the minimum wage to clear the poverty line after housing costs; but because of the way the benefits and tax system operates, a lone parent with one child working only 16 hours at the minimum wage is above the threshold......

....Tax credits are running at about £20 billion a year. But is the money buying better kids? Extraordinarily, no investigation into the effect on child outcomes of all the extra expenditure seems to have been undertaken. When Unicef published its comparative assessment of the lives of children earlier this year, it put the UK last; brought down by its poor family relationships, bad behaviour and risky conduct (drug taking, drunkenness, early sex and pregnancy rates, bullying and violence). For the entire spending binge, there are no detectable improvements in social outcomes.

What is certain is that the erosion of family structure, with children more and more born to lone women, often of low ability, who may or may not be in transient relationships with various men, are creating such fragile, feral conditions that child-rearing cannot be adequately accomplished. And this escalating family disintegration is being incentivised by the tax and benefit structure.

NZ's rate of working single mothers is almost identical to the United Kingdom's.