George Osborne: "High earners don't pay tax!"

From the BBC:

Mr Osborne said: "It's very hard to justify taxing people on much lower incomes in order to pay the child benefit to some of the better off in our society."

Oh dear. For higher earners, Child Benefit is a tax rebate. They are not being given the tax money paid by people on lower incomes, they are being given a little bit of their own income tax back. It's just administratively far simpler to do it this way than to give higher earning parents extra personal allowances for their children.

He merrily continues in the same vein:

He confirmed the cut would hit homes with a single or two high earners. But families with two parents on more modest incomes - which might add up to over £44,000 - will keep the benefit.

Isn't this more couple penalties and disincentives to marriage?

He defended this by saying his plan was "the most straightforward" option - which avoided means testing.

How is this not means testing?

In any event, while the cash cost of paying Child Benefit to higher earners is indeed £1 billion a year, as the article claims, the admin costs and fraud etc are virtually nil. Greater minds than mine have calculated that it would cost more than £1 billion in admin and hassle to somehow claw it back from higher earners. If you want higher earners to be a bit worse off, the simplest way of doing it is to reduce the threshold for higher rate tax, or even better, introduce some more bands for Council Tax (all the way up to Band Z if necessary). And so on.