Another year, another budget to tell us how much more cash we have to pay out in taxes.  The usual rises were there – alcohol, cigarettes, and fuel duty, with strong cider drinkers taking a serious hit! – but not too much else to speak of.

The minimum wage will increase slightly but the tax-free earnings threshold will remain frozen, so no great shakes there.  In fact, there wasn’t much to complain about other than the dreaded rise of fuel duty, but even this has been delayed slightly, to be introduced in stages over the coming year.  However, unless you’re a Green Peace activist, you’d have to agree that fuel duty is extremely unfair on certain groups of people, particularly the transport industry.  Ultimately, it leads to price increases on all consumer goods so you’d think there was a fairer way to spread the taxation burden.

There was good news for first-time house buyers with the scrapping of stamp duty for 2 years for those purchasing properties under £250,000.  This, of course, will be balanced out by an increase of stamp duty on houses over one million pounds, but it probably sounds like a good idea to the majority of people.

Another snippet of good news was that government borrowings will be £11bn lower than previously anticipated, largely due to lower-than-expected unemployment figures.  Some political commentators seemed to enjoy proclaiming this figure to be a drop in the ocean, but I fail to see how saving £11bn can be a bad thing!  Plus, of course, the main point here is that less people are out of work, which is great for everyone.

Things are still a little sluggish in the retail sector, although it was announced earlier in the day that retail figures are actually a little higher than expected.  Again, great news and a sign that things are improving bit by bit.  With this in mind, we still have a huge sale of at least 40% off virtually all bean bag products, and even more off some items such as beanbags in our leather range.

Overall, it seems we’ve been let off rather lightly, but I suspect there’ll be a bit more to come after the election.  Still, we do seem to be heading in the right direction so fingers crossed that the whole banking/economic crisis will soon become just memory.

Thanks for reading

Cozibag Bean Bags

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.