'''Don't Trust Anyone'''

Don't Trust Anyone
The first thing to know is that you can't trust anything you read. Except when someone tells you not to trust anything. You can trust that. Everyone has an agenda. My own agenda is that I want what's best for my kid.
The mainstream press has their own set of influences and none of these groups benefit from Scotland's Independence. This includes the BBC and STV. The BBC's budget in Scotland is £86m while taking £300m in license fees.
So as I tell you not to trust any headline, it's only fair that I tell you not to trust anything that I'll write. Question all of it. I'm not an expert… no one is, there's just too much information out there.
You might be a bit sceptical of my claims, after all I just said you shouldn't trust me, so let's have a quick example from the Telegraph. Studies say 60% of people just read the headline, deduce the content and then move on. So...
Alex Salmond's local income tax 'to cost families £550'.
So that sounds like he's taking money from everyone - even the poorest. And look at his face, that glib smile as he wants to take our money. I never liked that guy. The only reason I use this article is that someone used it to argue against independence... anyway.
Let's look at the points, there's really not many
* Families with two average earners each with an average salary of £25,729 would pay £1699 instead of their current council tax.
* And what is the average council tax? £1149
So the average person is £550 worse off. That's some sound maths right there… what a git, next article.
Wait.. will two people that each have an average salary live in an average sized house? How average is it that two people in the same household have that average salary? What can we even deduce from an average salary? What if there are a few that earn obscene amounts of money, won't that skew the average such that most people could actually be much poorer and these figures actually are not in any way representative of most of the population?
These are the only figures I have that are sort of useful (from Robin McAlpine's of the Reid Foundation - I'll link him later)
1 in 5 people in Scotland earn between £25k-£35k. 3 out of 5 earn less than £25k and half of those earn less than £21k.
If you are earning £14k, you are still better off than a third of the working population of Scotland (this includes part time workers).
So from that you can see that the most average 'household' doesn't have an income anywhere near £51.5k per year which also means the average of those that earn £51.5k are not paying the average council tax of only £1149. The math is way off. To me it actually seems like families with low incomes will be paying much less while higher earning families up to £50k will still be paying less to around the same (given they have larger houses at the top end), it will only be very high wage earners that will be worse off. I'm ok with this. But is this what the headline said?
I'm especially suspicious whenever I read the word 'average'. Especially where London is involved because Inner London is the richest region in the whole of Europe by far and it skews everything when it's included in any 'average' result. In the financial heart, the average City salary is £90,930, dropping to £53,100 in inner London areas. Remember this is also the most densely populated area in the UK. The Greater London area has a population of over 12 million - compare with Scotland's entire population of 5 million.
So now that I've told you not to trust anything you read, I'll ask you to trust this one. Because bad press and misleading stats mean the public is wrong about everything. So yeah, that one is fine. But the message from that one is important too because we're told...