Thank you for downloading this week's more or less podcast. Here's Tim Harford.

Hello, and welcome to more or less your numbers. I view of the news this week

How much should you be earning if you're a 43-year-old man called David?

Why the UK's inflation target is set it between 1 and 3% and why we keep missing it and more from our psychic Simeon Jack

We'll also be exposing a cunning media hoax

So what I did was I took all the data on the number of mobile phone

Transmitter masks in each county and the United Kingdom and then I showed that has an extremely strong correlation to the number of births in the same regions

But first on Monday the government announced that a key element of English local government funding would be cut by

9.9% in 2011 to 2012 and by 7.3% in 2012 to 2013

Speaking in Parliament the community secretary Eric Pickles was emphasizing a different number

In fact, Mr Speaker the average reduction in spending power for

2012 for 2011 2012 is 4.4%

There is a simple explanation for this

Councils have other sources of revenue beyond their ground from local government

So it is logically possible for a 9.9% fall in the government grant to lead to a 4.4% fall in average spending power

But the details of how the central government grants are calculated are fiendishly complicated

I asked Hugh Grover the director of policy for London Councils and one of the few people who seems to understand how it all works

How it all works? Well, unfortunately Tim, there's no

Really simple answer to that question because the world of local government finance is just so complex

But in big picture terms you could say that there are two main sources of funding for local government putting aside things like fees and charges and their own

Interest from investments and so on

And those two main sources are council tax and government grant

...