Prime Minister Gordon Brown has done a terrible job and is widely unpopular.. But even if the opposition party wins control later this year, it may not make much of a difference. The leader of the Tory party, David Cameron, is a British version of a RINO. He has not pledged to reduce the burden of government spending (which, as the chart illustrates, has skyrocketed). He has not pledged to reverse Brown’s dramatic increase in the top tax rate. And now the Conservative Party is expressing support for a huge increase in the value-added tax. The UK-based Times reports:
A rise in VAT is looming whichever party wins the general election, as Labour and the Conservatives draw up plans to balance Britain’s books. Alistair Darling and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, are both considering raising VAT to as high as 20 per cent — the European average — from the current rate of 17.5 per cent, The Times has learnt. …One City source close to the Tory tax team said: “There is a view across the Conservative Party that VAT is going to have to go up.” The Chancellor is also keenly aware that Britain needs to retain the confidence of the credit-rating agencies. He has privately ruled out either raising income taxes or increasing the scope of VAT, but has deliberately left open the possibility of increasing the sales tax in the next Parliament.
P.S. As usual, my technical skills are grossly deficient and I can’t figure out how to get the graph to appear, but click on the box to see how the burden of government has exploded in the United Kingdom (makes George W. Bush and Barack Obama look like fiscal conservatives by comparison).
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[…] And he has refused to say that he will undo Gordon Brown’s reckless decision to raise the top tax rate from 40 percent […]
I’m going to go out on a limb (not really) and suggest that there’s a correlation between their exploding governmental burden and the proliferation of outrageous stories coming out of the country. They aren’t just in a world of hurt fiscally, but are also tumbling into an abyss of cultural moonbattery.