Back in march, when John Key first signalled that he was going to take the razor to Working For Families, he criticised the "quite extraordinary" reach of the scheme. The clear implication: WFF would be cut for high-income earners.
Today, we see what that means: comparing these two tables, it seems that he's lowered the cutoff for the family tax credit by all of $2,000. The price of that? Lower payments for everyone else, and a commitment to erode the scheme in the long term.
In other words, that suggestion that there would be significant cuts at the top was just spin (as we knew it was, because there's no money to save there), cover for a broader attack on the living standards of ordinary kiwis. Meanwhile, Key gets to keep his thousand dollar a week tax cut. Which is what happens when you have a government of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.
