Upshot of Rishi Sunak’s spring statement? A bleak decade ahead

theguardian.com:

Much has been written about the year of economic misery ahead. Rishi Sunak’s attempts to mitigate the impact of the squeeze on living standards have been pored over and – generally – found wanting. The post-mortem examinations carried out on the chancellor’s spring statement were unflattering.

There was plenty for the thinktanks that specialise in analysing tax, spending and living standards – the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies – to mull over.

The former said the UK faced a year of cost-of-living misery during a parliament of pain. The latter said it was a bad time to be out of work and reliant on state benefits. Both were agreed the current setback to household budgets was the continuation of a now long-established trend.

Put simply, Britain has ceased to be a country where workers can expect to get better off year after year once inflation is taken into account.

In 1990, real average earnings at today’s prices stood at around £22,000 a year. During the next 18 years they rose steadily so that by 2008 they were £30,000. Since then, real average earnings have moved sideways and if current trends continue they will have risen to just £31,000 by 2027. Had the 1990-2008 trend continued, real average earnings would be about £11,000 a year higher at around £42,000.

According to the Resolution Foundation: “With real wages in the midst of a third major fall in a little over a decade, average weekly earnings are on course to rise by just £18 a week between 2008 and 2027, compared to £240 a week had they continued on their pre-financial crisis path.”

This is a staggeringly poor performance triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The IFS’s director, Paul Johnson, says the result of the near-death