BLOOM AND THE BABY BOOMERS

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I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a certain BBC reporter:

Whenever I listen to a Jonty Bloom report on 'The World Tonight' I start to feel anxious about my wallet. Jonty's always after more public spending, and that means he's after my money.

Well he was at it again on tonight's programme.
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The topic was the 'unfairness' of the disparity in wealth between the baby boomer generation and the younger generation and Bloom was back on some of his favourite themes. As ever he had a leftie professor to back him up, this time John Hills of the L.S.E. (more about whom can be found here http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/j.hills@lse.ac.uk).
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"Much of that unfairness will be sorted out over time", said Jonty. "Many young people will inherit a lot of money when their parents die; however that won't be evenly or fairly spread around, says Professor Hills" (as indeed he does).
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Bloom goes on. "Such inequalities between the generations and in coming years between those who inherit and those who don't can, of course, be sorted out by government action". Bloom is always after more government action (see http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-wallet-trembles.html and http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/12/pre-budget-bias.html).
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What does he mean? Well, we know Jonty likes Inheritance Tax and is not ashamed to let us know about it (even though most of us don't agree, according to polls that the BBC doesn't like) - see http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/10/more-bloomin-bias.html - so he continues, "by, for instance, making baby boomers pay more inheritance tax or capital gains tax on their homes, work longer or have smaller pensions".
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"You might think it would be a brave government that suggested such things," he says, "but John Pawsey and Janet Galley (who he meets in a West End hotel) would be willing to help others". Indeed (they say) they would, Janet adding "I don't have a problem with using taxation to support the population generally." How lucky for Jonty to have met a couple who (say they) support his love of taxes (more about which please see http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.com/2009/10/bloomin-bias.html). Of course, people always say this sort of thing & we all know hardly any of them really mean it!! People tend to be in favour of other people paying taxes. (How cynical of me!)

After this piece of naked left-wing propaganda came a political discussion on the same subjected, hosted by Ritula Shah. It featured David Willetts for the Tories, Kitty Ussher for Labour and Stephen Williams for the Lib Dems. Mr Willetts was asked 5 questions and interrupted twice, Kitty was asked 3 questions and interrupted once, Mr Williams was asked 3 questions and not interrupted at all.
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