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   Captain Haddock wrote:

  All the talk of Jimmy Carr and Garry Barlow is silly.
  
  It's about as useless as citing examples (as the Mail does) of some poor fat single parent who has given her spawn half a container's worth of toys from China for Christmas at the expense of the ubiquitous 'hard working tax payer' as 'proof' that social security payments are to high.
  
  The only way to analyse the government effects of Government policy is by looking at hard data. The 'fact' that Fidel Castro had a wealth estimated at $900 million a decade ago does not mean that socialism/communism obviously (sic) does not work any more than the 'fact' that one in every six of the rich world’s children is living in 'poverty' (UNCF) report means that wealth 'causes' poverty.
  
  The unpalatable FACTS for the usual whining suspects e.g. clerics, Guardian readers and worse of all Guardian reading clerics is that - as the graphs show above
  
  1. The difference in highest incomes and lowest incomes has been REDUCING over the past 6 years.
  
  2. The disposable income of the bottom 20% is RISING faster than any other group and the disposable income of the top 20% is actually FALLING.
  
  What's not to like?
  
  Life is not fair and never has been. Poor old Job in the Bible had done bugger all wrong and had all sorts of grief thrown at him AND to add insult to injury had his mate Bildad turning up suggesting he must have brought God's wrath upon himself. I believe Bildad is now writing for the Daily Mail.

  
  
  Can you clear up whether those highest and lowest incomes that you cite are gross pay or net pay (i.e. BEFORE tax or AFTER tax)? Seeing as tax was the point of dispute I think that matters in both our arguments, don't you?

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