The Institute for Fiscal Studies has released a handy interactive tool that lets you analyse how all the tax and benefit changes since 2010 - the year the Conservatives were elected into government under David Cameron - have impacted the disposable incomes households have at their disposal.
You can segment the chart in various ways including by household income, family type, having children and so on.
It may be a fairly harrowing experience for anyone who hasn’t been following the impacts to date. Its default setup, showing impact of changes to benefits and direct taxes since 2010 shows that the people with the lowest incomes suffered the most. By far.
The general pattern is people with higher incomes were more rewarded by the changes. The rich get richer, the poor suffer more and more.
The exception is the top decile by income who did lose disposable income - equivalent to £2180 per year since 2010. That might sound a lot, but it’s less even in absolute terms that the £2205 that the poorest decile lost out each year.
And because people with the highest incomes have…well…higher incomes to start off with - higher by an order of magnitude on average - in percentage terms the losses by the poorest folk are far, far more dramatic.
Truly sickening. Headlines such as “Absolute poverty: UK sees biggest rise for 30 years” and “Official child poverty statistics: 350,000 more children in poverty and numbers will rise” cannot come as a surprise.
Perhaps the most dramatic, most terrifying, result I found within the chart so far has a relationship to the latter headline above. Whatever cruel untruths the more extreme members of the Conservatives party might like to pretend about adults in poverty, it’s hard for anyone to blame the children. But set the chart to look at working age households who have children and you’ll see that those who had the lowest 10% of incomes in that group apparently lost an astonishing £6,009 per year on average.
It beggars belief to even imagine how they could even begin to cope. I suppose the headlines show that many of them cannot.