And didn't councils do this for a while with council tax – before dropping it because it cost so much to do?

Well if the rich are going to save a load of cash when the rest of us fund the governments austerity polices why would you object to this being pointed out?

Even the idea the reduction in child benefit won't affect people who earn £50K instead of those who hit the higher rate is bonkers. Now a couple earning £99,999 can keep it whereas a single earning family on £50K lose it!

Even crazier is with the increase in personal tax allowance the more realistic scenario of a couple each earning £25K each will be about £5K a year better off than the one earner £50K household because they keep the child benefit and get two personal tax allowances compared to one. How idiotic is that?

The increased personal allowance isn't progressive either. Pensioners on the state pension (as is anyone already not paying tax) won't be any better off but are still having to pay increased VAT etc. Yet those families lucky enough to have two in work paying tax who are already doing OK will as I said get two tax breaks.

If you don't want the effects of these policies pointed out to you in the press, what do you want? People to remain uninformed and so vote these nutters in again?

I don't. I'm saying it's a strange budget to come up with. It seems, on first glance to be a perfect set of media soundbites for the opposition, as if they've turned a shotgun on their face and offered Milliband the trigger. I'm not suggesting the media should portray it any differently.

OK fair enough.

By the way, the biggest bullet in the gun is probably the change to the pensioners personal tax allowances. The higher ones you automatically get once you retire which increases again when you hit 75.

These are going to be frozen for existing pensioners and scrapped completely for people who retire from now on.

What is means is between now and 2016/17 tax year the treasury will save £3.3bn off the backs of pensioners paying more tax. This will go toward the cost of paying for the increase in personal allowance for working people.

The paper and the opposition ought to rip them apart over this. Robbing pensioners to pay for tax breaks to the rest of us?

And this was after that stuff about older people working longer because it keeps them from getting lonely, right?

Isn't it the classic "Do all you're nasty stuff in the first three budgets, then have two popular ones" strategy?

Could well be. Get it out of the way and just let it all descend into a tit for tat arguement that the public loses interest in, then pop £0.10 off fuel duty and raise benefits before the election.

If everyone's tax is spent in the same way, and you'd have to assume it would be, a simple web application would do it. i.e. if x% goes on defence and y% on the NHS, the app could just use your tax paid figure and split it up. With a bit more work it could do the same from your personal details and NI number.

Nice of the government to pretend that the price of beer is not going up when in fact its going up by 5.4% a pint. 2% plus rate of inflation

Noticed Osbourne did not once utter the phrase " were all in this together ", but all the front bench of millionaires blushed when Milliband asked them to nod if they were now to get a 5% tax cut. Hypocrites

According to the further detail now published on the HMRC website, these statements will only be available to customers who submit their tax returns online. So presumably it will just be an extra option once you log on to SA Online.

So if you're a PAYE employee or submit your returns on paper, you're probably not going to get one.