The Tory Warning to U.S. Republicans Liz Truss is being made the scapegoat for failed tax-and-spend policies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tory-warning-to-u-s-republicans-11666305620?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
For the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in British history, Liz Truss sure has a lot of ignominy loaded on her shoulders. She’s apparently responsible for the fall of the pound, a looming recession, and the political demise of the Conservative Party. All accomplished in a mere 44 days.
Ms. Truss resigned as PM Thursday after a fiasco of a premiership, but the fault is far from hers alone. She is being made the scapegoat for the economic policy blunders that the ruling Conservatives have made over 12 years in power, and especially since 2019 under previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Ms. Truss’s tax cuts lasted two weeks as a mere proposal and never even came to a vote in Parliament. She had told the Tory rank-and-file about her tax plans when she ran to succeed Mr. Johnson. The only surprise she offered in office was a cut in the top marginal income tax rate to 40% from 45%—about £2 billion in lost revenue in a year. Yet this supposedly was the nail that lost the shoe, that lost the horse, that lost the economy.
Ms. Truss certainly mismanaged her policy rollout. She didn’t prepare the country or her party to sell tax cuts after a decade of Tory tax-and-spend politics. She lacked an electoral mandate of her own and only narrowly beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the PM contest. When markets fell after exotic pension fund schemes broke down amid rising interest rates, she lost her nerve. She sacked her first Chancellor and threw over her program. The Tory sharks then went for the kill.
But Ms. Truss didn’t create Britain’s 10.1% inflation rate (blame the Bank of England), didn’t produce energy shortages and price spikes (blame the last two Prime Ministers), and didn’t fail to supervise pensions so they wouldn’t gamble to get higher returns. All of that was in motion before she took office.
Rough political justice would now give the premiership to Mr. Sunak, whose policies contributed to this economic mess. Whoever gets the PM job may be volunteering for a suicide mission, as an election must be held by January 2025. Even the Labour Party could beat this pack of panicked Tories.
The dumbest argument is that Ms. Truss’s fall is a warning to U.S. Republicans not to cut taxes. Ms. Truss wanted pro-growth policies to counter the economic failures of the Boris Johnson Tories, who pursued the policies lauded by America’s big government conservatives: more welfare and healthcare entitlements, green energy subsidies, higher taxes on business, and easy money.
If Republicans want to end up like the Tories, they’ll follow the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak tax-and-spend model.
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