What price higher taxes?

I didn't watch the budget last week with any great interest. I know I'll be affected by some of the changes that were announced, but somehow I couldn't quite summon up the enthusiasm to listen to an over-optimistic chancellor describe an economic future designed to make his maths look better than it is.

Call me cynical, but I can't see things changing for quite some time.

What does bother me is the fixation there has been in certain parts of the media about the announcement to introduce a 50% tax rate for earnings over £150,000. My old college friend Simon Jones blogged about it last week here. His point is well made that there are far more people trying to survive on $1 a day (about 68p) than will be affected by the new tax rate. And remember, if it works like all the other tax rates, it will only be applied to earning above £150,000.

I have no reason to doubt Simon's maths, but when I did the calculations myself, deducting tax and National Insurance from £150,000 a year leaves £258 a day. Not a week, or a month, but a day. That surely sounds rich in any language by comparison to 68p. In fact, if your household income after tax is greater than £3000 a month then your household lives on £100 a day and if it's more than £2000, then you have one hundred times the financial resources of the poorest people on which to live every day. 

Perhaps as a first world nation we should take responsibility for what has happened and accept that it is going to cost us to sort things out and that we need a new model of equity in economics. 

Equity is not the same as equality. Everybody does not need to have the same, it just needs to be more equitably distributed. It simply cannot be right that the gap continues to rise between rich and poor.

I just wonder how we can get there.