ABSTRACT
BIG PHASE 1 starts the liberation process. By contrast BIG PHASE 1 proposes tax-free incomes for adults without children that are completely symmetrical between men and women, married and single, earners and non-earners. BIG PHASE 1 keeps one-parent benefit, but only for the minority of lone parents with children under five. BIG PHASE 1 would have distributed the gains more evenly across the population, with a bias in favour of working families with children. TAXMOD is less useful for measuring the redistributive effects of BIG PHASE 1 than for the costings. BIG PHASE 2 would reinforce the impact of BIG PHASE 1. The thing to notice is the very small scale of change at the bottom of the earnings distribution as a result of Mr Nigel Lawson's "humdinger" budget. By comparison with 1987–1988 net incomes BIG PHASE 1 produces gains for almost everybody, which is not surprising given the huge scale of Mr Lawson's tax cuts.
