Bad stats means more poverty and lower wages .

Families are facing the biggest fall in income since 1970s

Middle-income families are suffering an ‘unprecedented collapse’ in living standards as inflation and poor wages wipe thousands off incomes.

As incomes continually rises year on year, this so called 'fall' in incomes is of course referring to the rather wooley 'in real terms'.

Incomes may not be rising at the same rate as inflation, but the stock answer to this is to complain about the terrible Tory cuts rather than the inability of middle income families to adapt to the changing times and reduce their outgoings.

This means a typical couple with two children is likely to be £2,080 worse off in 2013 terms than they were last year as their real income falls from £30,056 to £27,976.

Which means that over the next couple of years we can either complain that it's all not fair or we can tighten our belts in preparation. I would be interested to see how many children are born over the next two years to parents who are already starting to feel a pinch. How many widescreen TV's, electrical gadgets, phones and 4x4s will be purchased by people screaming that their wages are nor rising to meet their needs.

The IFS also forecast that 600,000 more children will be pushed into poverty by 2013, taking the total living in ‘absolute’ poverty to 3.1million.

I was going to have a rant about how there is no 'poverty' in England, and what these reports class as poverty is actually nothing of the sort. There is no need for me to bother because Dioclese has covered it all nicely here.

The problem is the way in which poverty is incorrectly calculated.

An individual is in relative poverty if they live in a household whose income is below 60% of the average in that year, and in absolute poverty if a household's real-terms income is below 60% of the 2010/11 average. Source: IFS

By these standards there will always be poverty. The gap between the top and bottom earners is what drives the amount of poverty. Average low incomes can increase by 20%, but if average high incomes increase by 50%, poverty increases, even though everyone is better off.

This is a very misleading way of calculating poverty and it only serves to attempt to vilify those who are on high incomes.

Poverty means that you cannot afford to feed and clothe yourself. No more, no less.

The report was seized upon by Labour as evidence that the Government is condemning hundreds of thousands of children to lives in poverty.
And Shadow Treasury Minister Chris Leslie said: ‘The Tory-led Government’s policy of cutting spending and raising taxes too far and too fast has delivered slower growth and higher unemployment, which will mean billions more borrowing than planned.’

The current mess we are in was created by the now shadow cabinet with their reckless tax, borrow and spend policies. They also brought about the entitlement culture in which we now live, making it exceedingly difficult for people to accept the need for less waste and to help themselves budget properly and tighten their belts.

However, official figures, to be published today, are expected to show the unemployment crisis is getting worse, particularly among the young.
The latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics showed a record 20.8 per cent of those aged between 16 and 24 are unemployed.
And the numbers are rising rapidly. Between May and July, an extra 78,000 joined the youth unemployed, pushing the total to 973,000.

New Labour didn't help with that either. Young people are leaving the socialist, 'No child left behind' education system with their degrees in Nail Art, only to find the minimum wage has priced them out of work