By Monica Showalter
A Margaret Thatcher she is not.
Liz Truss, the U.K.’s new prime minister, billed herself to the public as that, but the mess she’s made of the British economy, which includes a cave-in on a proposed tax cut, is pretty much the opposite of What Thatcher Would Do.
According to Fox News:
The U.K. is canceling plans to impose a major tax cut for the nation’s top tax bracket following widespread frustration and market chaos, U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss announced Monday.
Truss’ plan had called for eliminating the U.K.’s highest tax bracket, resulting in a major cut for citizens making more than $168,000 annually. Truss and her government stood against criticism of the plan for weeks, arguing that it would create economic growth amid fears of a recession.
She nevertheless backed down on the plan with a Monday tweet.
“We get it and we have listened,” she wrote. “The abolition of the 45pc rate had become a distraction from our mission to get Britain moving. Our focus now is on building a high growth economy that funds world-class public services, boosts wages, and creates opportunities across the country.”
Get what? What on earth is she talking about? Can you imagine Lady Thatcher telling the rabid leftists as she caved to their demands something like: “We get it”?
Eeew.
Aside from that, the whole thing pretty much stinks any way you look at it. A planned elimination of the 45% tax bracket for people making the U.S. equivalent of $168,000 a year or more is hardly a tax cut for “the rich,” it’s a badly needed tax cut on the private sector to ensure the creation of small businesses and the jobs that go with it as the COVID-hangover recession approaches. Truss wasn’t up to fighting for that as the left hollered about it.
But it also wasn’t a terribly good plan. A good tax break plan ought to affect the entire population, not just the upper middle class segment. Throwing it out there and then letting the left yell about tax cuts for the rich is Doing It Wrong. What horrible planning these people have initiated.
It gets worse. The left also is yelling about the Truss budget’s plan to increase borrowing. Truss, it seems, wants to spend more government money for “infrastructure” and will need to borrow to do it. That’s pure Joe Biden, and with the U.K. battling scary high inflation already, it’s time to cut the size of government immediately and throw some ice on the overheated government money-printing presses.
Truss, in other words, is willing to throw out the tax cut, but not willing to throw out the government spending plans. What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s obviously a complicated picture, and there are probably some mitigating factors for the kind of pressure Truss is under, among which is market turmoil in the past week.
But it’s wimpery at its worst, the most un-Lady Thatcher-like of behavior, and one that is sure to keep Britain’s Tories plunging in the polls which is what’s going on right now.
Britain needs tax cuts, an unleashing of Britain’s energy industry, and a hard, tough leader who can say ‘no’ to the left and articulate why it’s not getting what it wants. Republicans in the states, take note, because the Truss ship appears to be sinking
Truss, thus far, isn’t up to the task. Let’s hope she rethinks some of these lessons before the Tories are completely obliterated in a coming leftist wave. If she can’t learn that, let’s hope the coming Republicans in the states can and not make the same mistakes twice.