Putting the cart before the half-truth

From an article in The Evening Standard on the topic of those pesky employer childcare vouchers:

"Londoners will be more heavily affected because salaries are higher in the capital to reflect [higher] housing costs (1), without necessarily making families significantly better off than people outside the capital (2)."

1) Horse/cart switcheroo: higher housing costs are a function of higher wages and productivity (itself a function of far better transport links, agglomeration etc) and not the other way round.

2) Half-truth: Net incomes of young people after tax and housing costs are of course pretty much the same all over the UK, because the additional income is largely soaked up by the housing/land market (see point 1). But people who bought a house in London before the house price bubble win on both sides of the equation - higher incomes and higher house prices to fund their eventual retirement, all to be paid by future generations of people who move there. So a lot of families in London are "significantly better off"