The (Missing) Ghost of Thatcherism

While President Javier Milei is easily the best head of state right now, it would be more difficult to pick the best head of state in my lifetime.

It may turn out to be Milei, depending on whether he ultimately can convince a hostile legislature to unshackle Argentina’s dirigiste economy.

Based on actual accomplishments, however, the choice would be between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Today, let’s focus on Britain’s Iron Lady.

As explained in a great documentary film, she rejuvenated the U.K. economy with a wide range of good policies that addressed major impediments to national prosperity.

• Slashing confiscatory tax rates
• A reduced burden of government spending
• Privatization of state-run companies
• Reducing runaway inflation

Yet not everyone is a fan of Ms. Thatcher.

In an article for World Politics Review, Alexander Clarkson claims that the Conservative Party is in trouble because it is enthralled with Thatcherism.

…the collapse of support for the Tory Party…may also be the product of…efforts by successive governments since former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979 to restructure the state along market-oriented lines. …When market-friendly, neoliberal approaches to governance failed to achieve expected outcomes, each new generation of Tory leaders convinced themselves that success would only be possible through doubling-down on ideological purity… Tory-led governments that followed under then-Prime Minister David Cameron in the 2010s were driven by a deeply held belief that shrinking the state was the only pathway to generating the economic growth needed… there are strong parallels between the former Soviet Union’s obsession with governing along supposedly “scientific” lines and the Thatcherite Tory Party’s belief that societies are shaped by rigidly predetermined laws of economic behavior. …it is no wonder that so much of the working-age population has turned against the political party whose ideological paradigms have dominated British governance since the 1970s.

This is nonsensical analysis.

Yes, various Tory leaders have paid lip service to Thatcher (much as U.S. Republicans in recent decades have said nice things about Reagan), but there’s a big difference between talking and doing.

And the various Conservative Party leaders this century (Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunak) have not delivered Thatcher-type reform.

The chart at the start of this column shows how the U.K.’s score for economic freedom jumped significantly under Thatcher. Let’s now look at the same data, but for 1970-2021, not just 1970-2000.

Lo and behold, we see that recent Conservative Party leaders (the Tories have been in power since 2010) have not improved economic policy. At all. Indeed, there’s been a slight downward trajectory.

At the risk of understatement, Thatcher’s ghost must be very disappointed.

To be fair, it would have been very difficult for recent Tory leaders to produce dramatic improvements. After all, policy in 2010 was not nearly as bad as it was when Thatcher took office.

So I would have applauded modest improvement. But I will not cheer for modest decline.

Here’s another chart in defense of Thatchernomics. It shows per-capita GDP in the big economies of Western Europe starting in 1950.

You can see that the United Kingdom started with a big lead (presumably a legacy of WWII destruction on the European mainland).

However, France and Germany soon caught up. And then they passed the U.K. (blame Clement Attlee’s post-war socialism).

Notice, though, how the U.K. economy grew faster under Thatchernomics and closed the gap.

Interestingly, while France and the U.K. have been close ever since, Germany opened up a lead (though recent missteps on fiscal and energy policy make me wonder whether the current gap will close.

The bottom line is that the United Kingdom still needs Thatcherism (just like the United States still needs Reaganism).

P.S. I can’t resist sharing one additional excerpt from Clarkson’s article.

Thatcher famously went from championing the deepening of the EU’s Single Market in the 1980s to espousing Euroskepticism.

Clarkson seems to think this reflects poorly on Thatcher, but it actually reflects poorly on the European Union. Thatcher liked the E.U. when it was a free-trade area based on mutual recognition, but she became disillusioned as it morphed into a supra-national bureaucracy pushing harmonization, centralization, and bureaucratization.

P.P.S. I didn’t include Liz Truss in the list of Tory leaders this century because she was only in office 44 days and didn’t have a chance to implement any policies. It would have been interesting if she stayed in power since she wanted pro-growth tax policy, though I wrote back in 2022 that she “should have announced a spending cap, modeled on either the Swiss Debt Brake or Colorado’s TABOR.” I also noted that “In addition to worrying about whether Truss will copy Thatcher’s track record on spending, I’m also worried about her support for misguided energy subsidies.

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United Kingdom Vs. Poland

Because it should not happen according to conventional economic theory, I put together an anti-convergence club to highlight richer nations that grow faster than poorer nations.

The common theme is that the richer nations have more economic liberty.

So even though convergence theory is generally true, it can go the other way if poorer nations are suffering from excessive government.

For today’s column, though, we’re going to look at an example of convergence rather than divergence. Here’s a chart, based on World Bank data, showing how Poland is catching up to the United Kingdom

This example of convergence is hardly a surprise. Poland’s economy was suppressed for decades because of communism.

And that meant genuine socialism, including government ownership, central planning, and price controls.

So when the Soviet Empire finally collapsed, Poland’s per-capita economic output was only about one-third of gross domestic product in the United Kingdom.

But since 1990, Poland has liberalized its economy and made significant progress.

Which raises the question of whether Poland will catch up – and perhaps even pass the United Kingdom.

That’s the focus of an article by James Crisp in the U.K.-based Telegraph. Here are some excerpts.

Poles will be richer than Britons in five years time because of Brexit, Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, has said. …“A fierce debate is taking place in Great Britain, caused by the World Bank’s forecast that GDP per capita will be higher in Poland than in the UK in 2025,” said Mr Tusk on the 20th anniversary of Poland’s membership of the EU. …The World Bank data shows GDP per capita in 2021 was $44,979 (£35,935) in Britain and $34,915 (£27,894) in Poland, which has an average growth of 3.6 per cent annually. That would mean Poland would overtake the UK by 2030, according to the calculations.

I have two reactions to the article.

First, the United Kingdom ranks higher than Poland according to both Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom. Everything else being equal, that suggests Poland won’t catch up.

Second, the article suggests that Poland will surpass the United Kingdom because of Brexit. That’s nonsense. If the United Kingdom falls behind, it will be in large part because that nation’s politicians failed to take advantage of Brexit. Instead of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames,” British politicians since Brexit have increased the burden of government.

Indeed, Poland now has a smaller burden of government spending, according to OECD data.

P.S. Many people think China’s growth has been impressive, but it doesn’t look very good compared to Poland.

P.P.S. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom doesn’t look very good compared to Australia and Switzerland.

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Great Moments in Botswana Government

When I write a “Great Moments” column, that’s always been a sign that some government is going to be subject to mockery.

For today’s column, though, I’m going to break with that pattern. That’s because I’m writing about the success story of Botswana, a country in southern Africa that has enjoyed remarkable growth thanks to comparatively good economic policy.

Is Botswana as good as Singapore? Or Switzerland?

No. Not even close.

But it enjoys far more economic liberty than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and unsurprisingly is experiencing a faster-growing economy.

But fast growth and free markets are not the reasons for a “Great Moments” column.

Instead, I want to applaud Botswana’s leaders for dunking on some vapid European politicians. Here are some excerpts from Jacqueline Howard’s BBC report.

The president of Botswana has threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany in a dispute over conservation. Earlier this year, Germany’s environment ministry suggested there should be stricter limits on importing trophies from hunting animals. Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi told German media this would only impoverish people in his country. He said elephant numbers had exploded as a result of conservation efforts, and hunting helped keep them in check.Germans should “live together with the animals, in the way you are trying to tell us to”, Mr Masisi told German newspaper Bild. “This is no joke.” Botswana is home to about a third of the world’s elephant population – over 130,000 – more than it has space for. …Botswana’s Wildlife Minister Dumezweni Mthimkhulu last month threatened to send 10,000 elephants to London’s Hyde Park so British people could “have a taste of living alongside” them. In March, UK MPs voted to support a ban on importing hunting trophies, but the legislation has further scrutiny to pass before becoming law.

Needless to say, British and German politicians won’t accept surplus elephants from Botswana. Instead, they’ll continue to engage in moral preening and virtue signalling.

Since politicians are almost always worthy of contempt, I could end the column at this point.

But there’s a bigger policy lesson. For those of us who like the outdoors enjoy seeing wild animals, national parks are only part of the story. What’s also needed is expanded property rights. As we see in the case of fisheries, that would create incentives for sensible and durable conservation.

P.S. On the issue of overall economic policy, I hope Botswana’s leaders will be wise enough to reject poisonous advice from the OECD and IMF.

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In One Image, Everything You Need to Know about Supply-Side Economics

When trying to educate someone about the importance of low marginal tax rates, what’s the most-convincing visual?

• A supply-and-demand graph?
• A philoso-raptor meme?
• A cartoon with two doors?
• A Dan Mitchell hypothetical?

I’m partial to the image I created, of course, but let’s look at a real-world example that is very compelling.

In an article about Tory tax policy for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Charlotte Gifford included a graph showing that a family with two children can have more disposable income with an income of £99,000 rather than an income of £144,000.

In other words, there’s a de facto 100 percent tax rate on the additional £45,000.

At the risk of understatement, there’s not much incentive to earn more income if the government imposes a de facto 100 percent tax rate.

That’s the kind of policy you expect to see in France, not the United Kingdom.

So why is it happening? Ms. Gifford explains.

High-earning parents are better off only working four days a week as bizarre tax rules mean it no longer pays to work. …One of the biggest distortions in the tax system occurs once a parent earns more than £100,000. …One reader told The Telegraph they were considering shortening their working week from five days to four after realising they would keep more of their pay by earning £92,000 as opposed to £115,000. Reducing the working week makes perfect financial sense for many parents earning £100,000 or more. By working fewer days they would not only dodge the tax trap but also cut their childcare costs, which currently average at £285 per week full-time, or £13,695 a year.

If you want details, the de facto 100 percent-plus tax rate is the combined result of three factors.

1. A statutory tax rate of 40 percent.
2. The government’s clawback of the value of the personal allowance, pushing the effective marginal tax rate up to 60 percent. As stated in the article, “Once someone’s salary hits £100,000 they lose the personal allowance at a rate of £1 for every £2 until it disappears at £125,140.”
3. The loss of a government handout. As Ms. Gifford wrote, “…once a parent earns more than £100,000…they lose their entitlement to free childcare… This creates a perverse incentive for parents earning £99,000 to turn down a pay rise so they can hold on to the government benefit.”

The moral of the story is that people respond to incentives.

When the government makes it less attractive for people to be more productive and earn more income, they respond by…drum roll, please…being less productive and not earning more income.

Which means less taxable income for the government (hello, Laffer Curve).

That’s the simple lesson of supply-side economics.

P.S. American readers should know that there are also examples of implicit 100 percent-plus effective marginal tax rates in the United States.

P.P.S. The United Kingdom has bad tax policy because it has bad spending policy.

P.P.P.S. To avoid these problems, nations should have flat taxes and limited government.

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Government Intervention and Relative Prices

I periodically share Mark Perry’s famous “Chart of the Century” to show that government intervention is a recipe for rising relative prices.*

Since economic principles don’t change when you cross national borders, one might expect to see similar patterns in other countries.

And we do. Here’s a chart from Matthew Lesh of the Institute for Economic Affairs in London. As you can see, overall inflation in the United Kingdom since 2000 has been 80 percent.

But prices have risen much faster in the sectors with lots of government intervention.

And prices have fallen, or risen at a slower-than-average pace, in the sectors where market forces dominate.

Here’s some of what he wrote to accompany the chart.

Prices have risen significantly faster than wages in the United Kingdom over recent years. The result has been a falling quality of life and significant hardship for tens of millions of households. Real household disposable incomes are now expected to be 3.5% lower in 2024-25 than their pre-pandemic levels… A useful starting point is considering which products have, and which have not, risen in price over recent years. …There have also been significant price increases in services and costs the government more directly controls, such as rail transport (+143%) – where the government sets around half the fares and heavily controls the sector – and council rates (+139%). …The products that have gone up most rapidly in cost include electricity (+425%), housing (+254%), and childcare (193%). Notably, these are sectors that have extensive state intervention through regulation and subsidies. …governments can and should change their approach to regulation. Cutting red tape in areas such as housing, energy, and financial services could reduce business costs and increase supply, resulting in lower costs for consumers.

This is spot on. As Ronald Reagan said more than 43 years ago, government is the problem.

And more government simply makes a bad situation even worse.

* Bad monetary policy is the recipe for overall increases in prices.

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The Negative Consequences of Big-Government Toryism

I was very optimistic about the United Kingdom less than five years ago. The Conservative Party had just won a landslide election and that presumably would lead to an acceptable form of Brexit, followed by some form of Singapore-on-Thames.

Well, the Tories did deliver on Brexit, but everything else want awry.

Instead of restraining spending and lowering tax rates, the Conservative Party went in the opposite direction: Higher taxes and a bigger spending burden.

We have witnessed the triumph of big-government conservatism.

But good news for “wet” Tories has been bad news for the people of the United Kingdom. Making Britain more like France has produced economic anemia.

And that means the Labour Party probably wins the next election in a landslide – which means even more bad policy.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about the envervating statism of the Conservative Party.

…the Tories have no one to blame but themselves. At least their predicament is a warning for others. ….Prime Minister Rishi Sunak…and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt…rode into office promising a more “responsible” path to economic growth built around balancing the government budget. This became a plan by Mr. Hunt to tax the economy back into growth, which is the sort of nonsense voters expect from parties of the left. …Now British voters are stuck with high taxes and slow or no growth. Tax revenue at 36% of GDP is the highest since the immediate aftermath of World War II. ….The Tories have squandered former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s 2019 majority because they fell for the idea that tax-and-spend policies and onerous climate regulation would appeal to a coalition of working-class voters in the north and urban Tory wets. …They have earned their looming political demise.

That’s a very grim assessment.

However, writing for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Allister Heath is even more pessimistic.

We are an increasingly impoverished and indebted nation… We crave French-style levels of “free” public services… We have lost interest in working hard, in deferred gratification, in getting up in the morning even when we don’t feel like it, but want to retain our triple-locked pension, subsidised public transport and generous welfare state, policies backed by Tories and Labour alike. …we feel able to spend even more on the NHS and constantly hike the minimum wage. We want to spend and spend and spend yet more, encouraged by demagogic politicians who tell us that we can have it all, but have forgotten that the world doesn’t owe us a living. With no economic growth, and a dire outlook caused by 25 years of social-democratic idiocy, …The tax take is already at its highest level since the late 1940s, and yet the state is incapable of delivering its core functions. …Meanwhile, billions are being spent on the rush to net zero, on “free” museums for the middle classes, on rocketing benefits bills and on endless woke madness. …In 1972, there were 4.5 workers per pensioner, today, it’s 3.3 and by 2072 there will only be 1.9 workers per pensioner.

As you can see, Allister isn’t just worried about bad policy.

He’s worried about the perfect (in a negative way) storm of bad policy, eroding societal capital, and demographic decline.

I realize that some readers may not care about the future of the United Kingdom. That being said, there are some ominous parallels with the United States.

Big-government Republicans haven’t copied all the mistakes of the big-government Tories, but there are enough similarities that we should be worried.

P.S. Some Tory apologists argued that at least you get managerial competence when the Conservative Party is in charge. If you read this, this, and this, you’ll be disabused of that notion. The failure of the NHS, after being showered with more tax dollars, is a perfect (in a bad way) example.

P.P.S. Those apologists also say that bad policy is sometimes necessary for political reasons. But it appears that Tories will suffer a giant defeat in the next election, so perhaps they should have tried good policy rather than claiming that the era of “free-market fundamentalism” was over.

P.P.P.S. At the risk of understatement, the U.K. needs another Margaret Thatcher.

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Everything You Need to Know about British Government, in a Single Tweet

Yesterday’s column looked at featherbedding in the Washington bureaucracy. Lots of overpaid middle managers and more boxes on the federal flowchart.

Basically, the real-world version of this satirical meme.

Today, let’s look at mindless incompetence by a foreign government.

Or perhaps deliberate incompetence would be a better term. That’s because bureaucrats in the United Kingdom have decided that the government can’t discriminate against companies that are incompetent.

I’m not joking. This tweet tells you everything you need to know.

I don’t know anything about the guy who issued the tweet, but he has a snapshot of a story from the Financial Times, and it deals with a very real scandal.

Basically, the British government contracted with a Fujitsu subsidiary for some software for post offices. But that software had terrible glitches that resulted in hundreds of local postmasters being falsely accused and convicted of financial malfeasance. If you want more information, you can read the horrific details on Wikipedia.

I could write an entire column about that scandal. It would be perfect for my series about “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”

But I’m instead including it in my “Everything You Need to know” series because I’m flabbergasted that the British government decided that it can’t give contracts to companies based on competence and performance.

That says a lot – and explains a lot – about why government does so many dumb things.

And it makes me wonder if we have a similar approach for the “beltway bandits” that get contracts from the US government?

P.S. What’s worse, the British government deciding it must do business with incompetent contractors, or the AOC plan to give handouts for people “unwilling to work“?

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The Non-Relationship Between Tax Cuts and Inflation

The British economy recently has been hammered by rising prices for the same reason that the American economy and the Eurozone economies were hurt by inflation.

Simply stated, central bankers engaged in reckless monetary policy.

And the Bank of England was no exception (even if it doesn’t want to accept responsibility for the damage it caused).

For purposes of today’s column, the main lesson to be learned, as Milton Friedman taught us many years ago, is that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

But lets focus on a practical application of that lesson, which is that politicians should not inaccurately blur the lines between monetary policy and fiscal policy.

I’m motivated to address this issue because of a story, written by Kylie Maclellan and Andy Bruce, that was published last week by Reuters.

British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said…he would not implement tax cuts that would push up inflation… Hunt…hopes will revive the fortunes of both a stagnant British economy and the governing Conservatives… He has been under pressure from some Conservative lawmakers who, alarmed at the opposition Labour Party’s big lead in opinion polls, have demanded he deliver tax cuts. “We do want to bring down the tax burden but we will only do so responsibly,” Hunt told Sky News. “The one thing we won’t do is any kind of tax cut that fuels inflation.” …Hunt’s options are limited after heavy state spending on the COVID-19 pandemic… “If we’re going to be a dynamic, thriving, energetic, fizzing economy, we need to have a lower tax burden,” Hunt told Times Radio, adding that the only way to bring personal taxes down was to spend public money more efficiently.

Mr. Hunt is wrong to imply that tax cuts have anything to do with inflation.

Which leads us to ask why he would create a false linkage. There are two possible explanations.

1. He thinks Keynesianism, with its misguided focus on aggregate demand, is the correct way of understanding the economy.
2. He doesn’t want significant tax cuts and is using inflation as an excuse so that his party can continue to spend more money.

For what it’s worth, both explanations are probably accurate, which explains why the U.K. Conservative Party is in such bad shape and will be resoundingly – and deservedly – defeated in the next election.

Republicans in the United States should (but probably won’t) learn from what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

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The Failure of Big-Government Tories Should Be a Warning to Big-Government Republicans

I’ve been very critical of big-spending Republicans like Trump for two reasons.

• First, bigger government saps economic vitality by diverting resources from the economy’s productive sector.
• Second, bigger government sooner or later will lead to massive tax increases such as a value-added tax.

I’ve also been critical of big spending Tories in the United Kingdom.

Just as today’s Republicans have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan, the U.K.’s Conservative Party has forgotten the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.

To be more specific, the Tories have allowed spending to increase, particularly during the pandemic.

But rather than undo that mistake, they have opted for big tax increases.

This is a path that is bad policy…and bad politics.

On that topic, Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal opined last week about the feckless incompetence of the British Conservative Party.

The Tories made a deal with the devil when they won power in 2010. Today they’re paying up. The deal concerned spending. Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne rode into office in 2010 on the back of a global financial panic that had become a fiscal crisis for the U.K. Government spending had ballooned to just above 46% of gross domestic product in the 2009-10 fiscal year, a level not seen since the mid-1970s… Believe it or not, British voters care about such things and responded well to Tory promises to get a grip on the public purse. But Messrs. Cameron and Osborne weren’t entirely candid… The absolute level of spending in inflation-adjusted terms was roughly 1.4% lower in 2013-14 than it had been when Messrs. Cameron and Osborne took office, but then crept upward to end the decade 3.5% higher than at the start of the Tories’ term. …a dollop of ultracheap money thanks to low interest rates…allowed the Tories to redistribute public spending toward entitlements. Social transfers to the elderly grew as a proportion of total spending to 14.5% from 13.8% between 2009-10 and 2019-20, and health spending grew to 18.5% from 16.2% as the Conservatives shoveled money into the NHS. …This shift has made the Tories the indentured servants of the welfare state. …If they lose the next election, a big part of the reason will be their twin failures to make realistic entitlement pledges and to prevent entitlements from devouring the cash necessary to fulfill their other promises. …When Mr. Trump inveighs against Social Security and Medicare reform, he threatens to ensnare the Republican Party in the same form of fiscal servitude in which British Tories are trapped.

For American readers, the last sentence of the above excerpt is key.

The Trump position on entitlements of kicking the can down the road is a recipe for massive future tax increases.

For British readers, the fecklessness of Tories is producing policies that are definitely bad for the U.K. economy (but almost certainly will be good for the Labour Party when the next election occurs).

The moral of the story is that good policy is not easy, but it beats the alternative.

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A Grim Assessment of British Fiscal Policy

I have been very pessimistic in recent years about the United Kingdom. Now, having just finished giving speeches in Bristol and London, I’m even more pessimistic.

The core problem is that the burden of government spending has expanded dramatically in recent years, in part because of the pandemic.

But there’s been no move to undo the damage. Instead, the (supposedly) conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have kept the spigots open.

So there’s a new spending baseline showing a permanent expansion in the fiscal burden.

And this does not even include all the additional spending that almost surely will get added because of demographic change.

Sadly, none of the experts I met with on my trip expressed much hope of reversing the nation’s fiscal decline.

Indeed, most of them have a a glum outlook. Including the ones I didn’t talk to. For instance, Fiona Bulmer authored some depressing analysis for CapX about the U.K.’s faux conservatives.

Now a Tory government boasts that it is spending “£407 billion on support for families, jobs and businesses”, borrowing is at its highest level since the war – and that’s only the start. …Ministers, commentators, the Bank of England…seem to believe that we have now finally created a climate in which the magic money tree can flourish. …spending discipline has been completely abandoned over the past year. …We used to believe that individuals and businesses would always be better at spending their own money than government, instead we must now celebrate that the Department of Transport is giving people £50 vouchers to get their bikes mended. The problem is that once public spending becomes celebrated as a virtue then the culture of cost constraint disappears and every part of government will adopt the Oliver Twist approach and constantly come back for more.

As you might expect, governments that spend too much also have bad tax systems.

That certainly is true in the United Kingdom. But, as reported by the Economist, the U.K. seemingly tries to make taxes as punitive as possible.

People in England, Wales and Northern Ireland pay a basic rate of income tax of 20% on annual earnings over £12,570 ($15,612)… Britons must also pay national-insurance contributions (NICs) of 12% of weekly earnings over £242… Recent university graduates with student debt must pay an additional 9% on anything they earn over £27,295. A 40% income-tax rate kicks in at slightly over £50,000, which is when parents also begin to be taxed on a welfare payment known as child benefit. The result can be a 60% marginal tax rate for those with two children and a 70% rate for those with three. For every £1 earned above £100,000, you lose 50p of the £12,570 tax-free allowance; the allowance falls to zero if your income is £125,140 or more. That means at least a 60% marginal tax rate for high-earning taxpayers—rising to over 100% for parents who start losing tax-free child-care benefits as well. …Value-added tax…is levied at a 20% rate on most final purchases by consumers. …Britain has some of the highest taxes on property of any country in the OECD.

Is there any hope of fixing this mess?

That is unlikely, given the profligacy of today’s Tory politicians.

But there is a solution if any of them eventually decide to be on the side of taxpayers. Writing for CapX, Gavin Rice opines that it is time to reform the welfare state and limit spending growth.

Despite Thatcher’s revolutionary attempt to shift responsibility back onto individuals and families, …the welfare state has grown and grown. Since 1948, welfare spending has risen from £11bn to well over £200bn, in today’s money – that’s 18 times more spent on social security than under Clement Attlee’s supposedly socialist Labour government. …spending…has also risen as a proportion of national income from around 4% in 1947 to over 10% by 2019, and is projected to rise to over 12% by 2065. …to sustain even pre-Covid spending habits over the medium term, the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that taxes would need to rise by one third in order to stabilise debt… Britain has an ‘inverse pyramid’ society with a minority of working adults sustaining a majority of economically inactive citizens. …when public spending requirements outstrip that growth, there’s a problem.

Since it reflects my Golden Rule, I particularly appreciate the last sentence in the above excerpt.

But I don’t appreciate how recent British Prime Ministers have violated that rule.

Makes me wonder whether Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak are doing more damage to good fiscal policy in the U.K. than George Bush and Donald Trump did to good fiscal policy in the U.S.?

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Thatcher, Lawson, and Pro-Growth Tax Policy

As documented in Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan saved their nations from economic malaise and decline.

Today, let’s focus on what happened in the United Kingdom.

Economic liberty greatly increased during the Thatcher years.

She deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the U.K.’s economic rebirth and renaissance, but she also had the wisdom to appoint some very principled and very capable people to her cabinet.

Such as Nigel Lawson, who served as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to a combined Treasury Secretary/OMB Director in the U.S.).

Lawson died last week, leading to many tributes to his role is resuscitating the U.K. economy.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarized his achievements.

…our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91. …the 1970s…was even more miserable in the United Kingdom than it was in the U.S. By the time Margaret Thatcher led the Tories into office in May 1979, inflation was raging and the country had been wracked by strikes in its “winter of discontent”… Lawson entered Thatcher’s administration… He made his historic mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer starting in 1983. He’s best known for his tax reforms, which reduced the top personal income-tax rate to 40% from 60% and brought the top corporate rate to 35% from a 1970s high of 52%. He also was a steward of the Thatcher administration’s privatizations of large state-owned firms and the “Big Bang” financial reforms that would transform London into a global financial center.

In a column for CapX, Madsen Pirie examines Lawson’s work.

Nigel Lawson left a huge legacy. Under his stewardship Britain went from being the sick man of Europe into becoming an economic powerhouse and one of the world’s leading economies. He is regarded by many as the finest Chancellor of the 20th century… Lord Lawson held the firm conviction that lower taxes created space for enterprise and opportunity, and made it his policy that in every Budget he would lower the burden of taxation and abolish at least one tax. …During his tenure, Britain was transformed from being an economy in which most major businesses and services were owned and run by the state, into one in which they became private businesses, paying taxes instead of receiving taxpayer subsidies. Failing and outdated state enterprises became modern, successful private ones. …His 1988 Budget…announced that all taxes above 40% would be abolished, and that the basic rate would be cut to 25%, its lowest for 50 years… Within a very short time, more money was coming into the Treasury from the lower rates than it had been taking in from the higher ones. It was a vindication of the Laffer Curve. …The top 10% of earners had been paying 35% of the total income tax take. Under Lawson’s lower rate that went up to 48%. In rough terms this meant that the top 10% went from paying just over a third to just under a half of total income taxes.

In other words, the lower tax rates in the U.K. had the same positive impact as the lower tax rates in the U.S., both in terms of encouraging growth and confirming the Laffer Curve.

But let’s not forget that there also was spending restraint during the Thatcher years, particularly when Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Just like we got spending restraint during the Reagan years.

The moral of the story is that it’s great to have good leaders, and it’s great when those leaders appoint good people.

P.S. If you want the U.S. equivalent of Nigel Lawson, the best historical example would be Andrew Mellon.

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Phantom Austerity at the U.K.’s Government-Run Health System

I often bemoan the fact that government intervention has created an expensive and inefficient health system in the United States.

But that does not mean I want a total government takeover of the health sector like in the United Kingdom.

Given the problems with the U.K.’s National Health Service, that would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Interestingly, many folks on the left also recognize that the NHS has problems. But they claim that long waiting lines and needless deaths are the result of too little money.

For example, in a column for the New York Times, Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick complain that their country’s government-run health system is being starved of funding.

…you don’t have to work in a hospital to know that Britain’s N.H.S. is in the most serious crisis of its history; you just have to be injured, or ill. Thousands of people are estimated to have died in the last year because of overwhelmed ambulance and emergency services. There are 7.2 million people in England, more than 10 percent of the population, on waiting lists for treatments… That the flagship health care service of one of the wealthiest countries in the world is in such a state is shocking, but not without explanation. Decades of marketization, 10 years of Conservative austerity and a pandemic have hollowed out the N.H.S… A government-commissioned report released last year called the years between 2010 and 2020 the N.H.S.’s “decade of neglect.” …The N.H.S. as Britons have known it — accessible, free at the point of use, cherished — is becoming something else. But as long as there are still people willing to fight for it, it’s not too late to save it.

If you read the full column, you might notice something very odd.

The authors share lots of data about the poor performance of the U.K.’s government-run system. And they share some good data about patient dissatisfaction.

But when they complain about how this is the fault of austerity, they don’t share any numbers.

That made me very suspicious, sort of like the dog that didn’t bark from Sherlock Holmes.

So I want to the website for the U.K. Office of National Statistics and found the data showing the breakdown of annual government spending and I looked at the numbers for health expenditures.

Lo and behold, there was no austerity.

If you look closely, there was a very brief slowdown in the rate of growth starting in about 2010, but there were never budget cuts.

Indeed, the burden of NHS spending grew by an average of more than 6.7 percent over the past 25 years – much faster than inflation over the same period.

The moral of the story is that the NHS is doing a lousy job, but it’s not because of a shrinking budget.

It’s failing because big government is bad government (the same lesson we learn when looking at more government and lousy results in the United States).

P.S. I mentioned at the start of the column that I don’t like the current health system in America and that I also don’t like the idea of a British-style system. If you want to know the better approach, click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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A Case Study on Corporate Tax and Competitiveness

Last year’s three-part series on corporate tax rates (here, here, and here) primarily focused on the case for low rates in the United States.

Today, we’re going to look at why the United Kingdom should have a low corporate tax rate.

Though the arguments don’t change simply because we cross the Atlantic Ocean.

A low corporate tax rate is a good idea because it means more investment, higher productivity, and better wages.

That’s true in the U.S., it’s true in the U.K., and its true in every other nation.

If you want evidence, Phil Radford’s article for CapX explains why the U.K.’s pharmaceutical industry has contracted while Ireland’s has expanded.

AstraZeneca’s plan to build a $350m pharmaceuticals factory in Ireland rather than the UK was 100% predictable. …the long-term failure of UK pharma highlights how UK policy discussion is light years behind our competitors when it comes to understanding what drives prosperity. …The trend kicked off back in 2011, when US-based Pfizer shifted its Viagra-making plant from Sandwich in Kent to Ringaskiddy, near Cork. This event marked the start of a five-year plunge in UK pharma manufacturing and exports… According to ONS, output in UK pharma manufacturing declined by roughly one-third from 2010 to 2015. Gross value added actually halved. Where did the manufacturing go? Ireland… What’s caused this malady? In a word: taxation. …corporate taxation levels appear to exert a dominating effect on where pharmaceuticals companies locate their factories. …Ireland’s corporate tax rate fell from 40% in 1996 to 12.5%n 2003, and it has stayed at that level for the past 19 years. Meanwhile, the UK’s corporate taxation rate was 30% 20 years ago, and from 2008 it began a gentle drift downwards to 19% where it will remain until April this year, when it will increase to 25%. This means, from AstraZeneca’s point of view, the investment equation is a no-brainer. Even if Ireland is forced to raise its rate to 15%, the country will shortly regain its general comparative level of between one-half and two-thirds the UK rate.

The data in Radford’s article is a damning indictment of the supposedly conservative government in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago, the corporate tax rate was 19 percent and expected to drop to 17 percent. Now, thanks to an unwillingness to control spending, the rate is jumping to 25 percent.

And, as noted in the article, the U.K. lost a $350 million factory. As well as all the jobs and taxable income that it would have generated.

Politicians are winning and people are losing.

P.S. Biden wants to make the same mistake.

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The Continuing Failure of Government-Run Healthcare in the United Kingdom

I’m routinely critical of the many ways that government intervention has created an expensive and inefficient health system in the United States.

But there are countries where government causes even greater problems. So when I want to feel good about America’s clunky healthcare system, I look at the mess across the ocean.

The United Kingdom has a socialist health system. And it’s real socialism, with government running the hospitals and employing the doctors and nurses.

And this produces predictably bad results.

I’ve shared numerous horror stories about that approach (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this report from David Parsley is so astounding that even some of my knee-jerk leftist friends may reconsider their support for big government.

Ukrainian refugees who travelled to the UK to escape the war are risking their lives by returning to their homeland to seek urgent medical treatments after giving up on the NHS. Due the NHS pressures and long waiting lists for procedures, Ukrainians living with families across the UK are taking the perilous trip back into a war zone where they are treated by doctors immediately despite Russian bombardments of their towns and cities. …Maiia Habruk escaped Kyiv last spring along with around five million fellow citizens and found a safe haven with a couple in south east London. But she returned to Ukraine in mid-December after failing to get the treatment she needed from her local hospital in Lewisham. …She decided the only way to get the treatment she believed she required was to make the 24-hour trip back to Ukraine, which includes a flight to Poland and a long and dangerous train journey to Kyiv. …Maiia, who witnessed almost daily bombing raids by the Russians while in Kyiv, knows three other Ukrainians in London who sought emergency health procedures back in their war-torn country due to the lack of availability of quick treatment from the NHS.

These people were engaging in cost-benefit analysis. They compared the risk of death, injury, or suffering from Russian bombs to the risk of death, injury, or suffering from languishing on a waiting list in the United Kingdom.

And they decided Russian bombs were the better option.

This disaster is attracting attention in other nations. The Wall Street Journal opined two days ago about the NHS.

The American left can’t seem to quit its desire for single-payer Medicare for All. So it’s worth noting that the United Kingdom, which already has a system resembling that socialist dream, is rethinking it amid another winter of healthcare misery. …Waiting times for ambulances for the most serious calls are getting longer, with the average response time reaching 10 minutes 57 seconds in December, compared to a target of seven. Once patients reach the emergency room, 35% now face waits above four hours… As of November, some 7.2 million patients have been referred for treatment but are waiting for it to start. Of those, 2.9 million have been waiting more than 18 weeks. The NHS considers itself a success if it starts treatment within that four-month window, which is the epitome of defining failure down. …Excess deaths in 2022 were the most since 1951, excluding the pandemic. …The U.S. suffers a chronic problem of healthcare financing but not of health-care delivery. Britain shows that with single-payer you end up with both. The U.K. also shows that single-payer’s biggest victims are low-income people who can’t afford to opt out.

Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system.

Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraph has a grim assessment of his nation’s government-run system.

…the NHS is finished. It is broken beyond repair, ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands, and threatening the social fabric and economic performance of our nation. …this 75-year experiment in health socialism has failed appallingly, culminating in a surge in excess deaths, waiting lists that aren’t worthy of a civilised nation, inhumane strikes, intolerable delays for ambulances, explicit rationing… NHS spending is up 12 per cent in real terms since 2019-20; there are 13 per cent more doctors and 11 per cent more nurses, and yet the service delivered 5 per cent fewer treatments in the first nine months of 2022 than in the same period in 2019. …Its six pillars – that it is “free” at the point of use, the full state ownership of hospitals, its complete dependence on taxpayer funding, its supposed culture of altruism, its nature as a shared moral project uniting rich and poor, and its centrally planned workforce – are the very causes of its disintegration.

P.S. I can’t resist some closing comments about the politics of government-run health care.

The first story cited above includes these comments from left-of-center U.K. politicians.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting told i “Vladimir Putin is dropping bombs on Ukrainian hospitals, yet patients are travelling back to Kyiv rather than face NHS waiting lists. …Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper said: “It’s a damning indictment of the government’s record on the NHS that Ukrainian refugees are returning to a war-torn country to access health care.”

Accurate criticisms, to be sure. But both Labour and the Lib Dems simply want to dump more money in the system.

But the so-called Conservative Party does exactly the same thing, as the Wall Street Journal noted in its editorial.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021 pledged an additional £36 billion over three years for the NHS and related home and nursing-home care, funded by a payroll-tax increase. Mr. Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt followed in November with another £3.3 billion a year for the next two years.

And Allister Heath made a similar observation in his column.

The Cameron-May-Johnson survival strategy was to “neutralise” the NHS by refusing to contemplate difficult reforms, genuflecting endlessly at its altar, prioritising it in every Budget, greatly boosting its funding after Brexit and worshipping it hysterically during the lockdowns; yet, in the end, it was the NHS that neutralised the Tories. Small-state, high-growth Toryism is incompatible with an unreconstructed NHS, with its need for ever-higher taxes. How long will the Conservatives continue to lie to themselves about this?

This is a good opportunity to revisit my “what’s the alternative?” argument.

Self-styled right-of-center parties have to choose whether to become tax collectors for the welfare state or whether to push for entitlement reform. There’s no other alternative.

P.P.S. There is one group of people who are net winners from the U.K.’s government-run system.

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Best and Worst News of 2022

Continuing a tradition that began back in 2013, let’s look at the best and worst developments of the past year.

Since I try to be optimistic (notwithstanding forces and evidence to the contrary), let’s start with the good news.

I’ll start by mentioning that we will now have gridlock in Washington. That’s probably a positive development, but I’ll explore that issue tomorrow as part of my “Hopes and Fears” column for 2023.

For today, let’s focus on three concrete developments from 2022 that unambiguously are positive.

States cutting tax rates and enacting tax reform – Since I’m a long-time advocate for better tax policy, I’m very pleased that more states are moving in the right direction. I especially like that the flat tax club is expanding. I’m also amused that a bad thing (massive handouts from Washington) backfired on the left (because many states decided to cut taxes rather than squander the money on new spending).

Chileans vote against a statist constitution – There was horrible news in 2021 when Chileans voted a hard-core leftist into the presidency. But we got very good news this year when the same voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed constitution that would have dramatically expanded the power of government.

More families have school choice – Just like last year, we can celebrate that there was more progress on education this year. In 2021, West Virginia led the way. In 2022, Arizona was the best example. And we’ll discuss tomorrow why there are reasons to be optimistic about 2023.

Now let’s shift to the bad news of 2022.

I thought about listing inflation, which definitely caused a lot of economic damage this year. But the bad monetary policy actually occurred in 2020 and 2021 when central bankers overreacted to the pandemic.

So I’m going to write instead about bad things that specifically happened in 2022.

Biden semi-successfully expands the burden of government – The president was able to push through several bad proposals, such as the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and some cronyist subsidies for the tech industry. Nothing nearly as bad as his original “build back better” scheme, but nonetheless steps in the wrong direction.

The collapse of small-government conservatism in the United Kingdom – Just as today’s Republicans have deviated from Reaganism, the Conservatives in the United Kingdom have deviated from Thatcherism. Except even worse. Republicans in the USA acquiesce to higher spending. Tories in the UK acquiesce to higher spending and higher taxes.

Massachusetts voters opt for class warfare – Starting tomorrow, Massachusetts no longer will have a flat tax of 5 percent. That’s because voters narrowly approved a class-warfare based referendum to replace the flat tax with a new “progressive” system with a top rate of 9 percent. Though bad news for the state’s economy will be offset by good news for moving companies.

P.S. I almost forget to mention that the best thing about 2022 occurred on January 10 when the Georgia Bulldogs defeated Alabama to win the national championship of college football.

P.P.S. While 2022 was a mixed bag, history buffs may be interested in knowing that it was the 100th anniversary of a big tax rate reduction (top rate lowered from 73 percent to 58 percent) implemented in 1922 during the under-appreciated presidency of Warren Harding.

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Convergence and Divergence for the United Kingdom

I’m a big believer in looking at long-run trends, particularly whether countries are experiencing convergence of divergence with regards to per-capita economic output.

Poor nations normally should grow faster than rich nations, so we can learn a lot when we see exceptions to this rule based on several decades of data.

• Why does/did South Korea out-perform North Korea?
• Why does/did Chile out-perform Venezuela?
• Why does/did the United States out-perform Western Europe?
• Why does/did West Germany out-perform East Germany?
• Why does/did Hong Kong out-perform Cuba?
• Why does/did Taiwan out-perform China?

I think the answer to these questions is obvious, for what it’s worth.

Today, let’s consider another example. Mike Bird of the U.K.-based Economist tweeted about how the United Kingdom is diverging from Australia.

Since Australia and the United Kingdom have similar levels of economic liberty, some people speculate the divergence we’re seeing has a lot to do with regional economic performance.

That makes some sense. Many of Australia’s trading partners are fast-growing nations in East Asia. More specifically, those countries have been buying a lot of of natural resources from Australian producers.

The United Kingdom, by contrast, has a lot of trade with Europe’s slow-growing nations.

The above chart is based on household disposable income.

So I decided to also check the Maddison database to see whether there were similar changes to per-capita GDP.

The charts don’t match exactly, but the trends are similar (I added the Czech Republic since it was mentioned in the tweet).

So is this the end of the story?

Not exactly. My next step was to add Switzerland to see whether trade with Europe dooms a nation to divergence.

Lo and behold, it is diverging with Australia, but in a positive way. It’s getting comparatively richer over time, just the opposite of what we see in the United Kingdom.

So maybe the real lesson is that there’s more prosperity – and the right kind of divergence – in nations with greater levels of economic liberty.

And Switzerland surely is a good role model for policy.

I’ll close with a couple of caveats. The level of economic liberty is important, but it does not tell us everything. Likewise, the level of growth in neighboring nations is important, but it does not tell us everything. Moreover, I normally like looking at four or five decades of data rather than just 20 years.

All that being said, I’m definitely not optimistic about the long-run outlook in the United Kingdom.

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In Five Sentences, Everything You Need to Know about Bureaucracy

One thing that became very apparent during the pandemic is that government schools are mostly run for the benefit of bureaucrats rather than students.

Not that any of us should have been surprised.

The same is true for other government bureaucracies, as well as parts of the private sector where there is a lot of government intervention that subsidizes featherbedding.

What’s especially galling is when budget increases are used to hire more bureaucrats, yet taxpayers get nothing of value in exchanges.

That’s certainly the case in the United States, where education bureaucracies (and education spending) have dramatically increased, yet there has been no concomitant increase in educational outcomes.

Another examples come from the United Kingdom where the government-run National Health Service gets more money and more bureaucrats every year, as explained in CapX by Fiona Bulmer, yet there’s never an improvement in health outcomes.

Indeed, these five sentences are a perfect example of government bureaucracies in action.

…the NHS in England employs the full time equivalent of 1.2 million people, nearly 200,000 more than they did in 2012.

…in 2021, the NHS was around 16% less productive than before the pandemic.

…one of the managers lamented to me that he could schedule a maximum of four knee operations a day but in the private sector they manage eight a day. 

…7m people on NHS waiting lists.

The NHS, like all organisations where users have no choice defaults to accommodating the providers not the consumers.

I’m left with two conclusions after reading those depressing numbers.

• First, the Conservative Party is unwilling to do anything to restrain spending on the NHS (or any other part of the UK budget), which is why their main role nowadays is to be the tax collectors for the welfare state.
• Second, the so-called national conservatives in the United States, given their dirigiste policy agenda of more intervention and more government spending, seem to want a very similar fate for the United States.

The obvious takeaway, as I’ve previously noted, is that if you don’t want massive future tax increases, there’s no alternative to what critics call “free-market fundamentalism.”

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The Tragic Triumph of Big-Government Conservatism in the United Kingdom

In the past couple of months, I’ve repeatedly addressed the fiscal and economic mess in the United Kingdom.

Today, we’re going to zoom out and identify the main cause of all the problems.

If you look at the annual budget numbers published by the Treasury Department in the United Kingdom, the first thing to notice is that there was a big surge of spending for the pandemic.

One can certainly argue that pandemic-related spending was necessary to deal with a one-time emergency.

Indeed, the same thing happened in the United States.

This second chart, however, shows the real problem with fiscal policy in the United Kingdom. Politicians have used the one-time emergency has an excuse to impose a permanent increase in the country’s spending burden.

This is an indictment of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s profligacy.

Johnson was then replaced by the short-lived Liz Truss, who proposed lower taxes but offered no plan to restrain spending.

And now the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, seems committed to an ongoing policy of higher taxes to finance permanently larger government.

In an article for Reuters, William Schomberg reports that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to the U.S. Treasury Secretary) apparently thinks higher taxes are needed to save the economy.

British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said he will have to raise taxes in next week’s budget plan in order to fix the public finances and soften a potentially long recession… “This is going to be a big moment of choice for the country and we will put people ahead of ideology,” Hunt told the Sunday Times in an interview. …Hunt and Sunak are trying to prepare their Conservative Party for the tax increases which could reignite tensions in the party… Hunt was also considering a multi-billion-pound package of support to shield pensioners and benefit claimants from higher power bills, the newspaper said.

At the risk of understatement, Jeremy Hunt knows nothing about economics. Or history.

I wish a reporter would ask him to name a single country, at any point in world history, that achieved more prosperity by raising taxes and increasing the burden of government spending.

I’ll close with a couple of additional observation.

• The U.K.’s version of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the nation’s shaky financial markets.
• The Sunak-Hunt approach of bigger government inevitably will mean slower growth and less prosperity for the people of the United Kingdom.

P.S. I never thought I would be reminiscing fondly about the fiscal policies of David Cameron and Theresa May.

P.P.S. But Margaret Thatcher is still the gold standard for responsible U.K. fiscal policy.

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European Fiscal Policy Week, Part IV: Bad U.K. Monetary Policy Leads to Bad U.K. Fiscal Policy

I was excited about the possibility of pro-growth tax policy during the short-lived reign of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

However, I’m now pessimistic about the nation’s outlook. Truss was forced to resign and big-government Tories (akin to big-government Republicans) are back in charge.

As part of my “European Fiscal Policy Week,” let’s take a closer look at what happened and analyze the pernicious role of the Bank of England (the BoE is their central bank, akin to the Federal Reserve in the U.S.).

Let’s start with a reminder that the Bank of England panicked during the pandemic and (like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank) engaged in dramatic monetary easing.

That was understandable in the spring of 2020, perhaps, but it should have been obvious by the late summer that the world was not coming to an end.

Yet the BoE continued with its easy-money policy. The balance sheet kept expanding all of 2020, even after vaccines became available.

And, as shown by the graph, the easy-money approach continued into early 2021 (and the most-recent figures show the BoE continued its inflationary policy into mid-2021).

Needless to say, all of that bad monetary policy led to bad results. Not only 10 percent annual inflation, but also a financial system made fragile by artificially low interest rates and excess liquidity.

So how does any of this relate to fiscal policy?

As the Wall Street Journal explained in an editorial on October 10, the BoE’s bad monetary policy produced instability in financial markets and senior bureaucrats at the Bank cleverly shifted the blame to then-Prime Minster Truss’ tax plan.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey is trying to stabilize pension funds, which are caught on the shoals of questionable hedging strategies as the high water of loose monetary policy recedes. …The BOE is supposed to be tightening policy to fight inflation at 40-year highs and claims these emergency bond purchases aren’t at odds with its plans to let £80 billion of assets run off its balance sheet over the next year. But BOE officials now seem confused about what they’re doing. …No wonder markets doubt the BOE’s resolve on future interest-rate increases. Undeterred, the bank is resorting to the familiar bureaucratic imperative for self-preservation. Mr. Cunliffe’s letter is at pains to blame Mr. Kwarteng’s fiscal plan for market ructions. His colleagues Jonathan Haskel and Dave Ramsden —all three are on the BOE’s policy-setting committee—have picked up the theme in speeches that blame market turbulence on a “U.K.-specific component.” This is code for Ms. Truss’s agenda. …Mr. Bailey doesn’t help his credibility or the bank’s independence by politicizing the institution.

In a column for Bloomberg, Narayana Kocherlakota also points a finger at the BoE.

And what’s remarkable is that Kocherlakota is the former head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and central bankers normally don’t criticize each other.

Markets didn’t oust Truss, the Bank of England did — through poor financial regulation and highly subjective crisis management. …The common wisdom is that financial markets “punished” Truss’s government for its fiscal profligacy. But the chastisement was far from universal. Over the three days starting Sept. 23, when the Truss government announced its mini-budget, the pound fell by 2.2% relative to the euro, and the FTSE 100 stock index declined by 2.2% — notable movements, but hardly enough to bring a government to its knees. The big change came in the price of 30-year UK government bonds, also known as gilts, which experienced a shocking 23% drop. Most of this decline had nothing to do with rational investors revising their beliefs about the UK’s long-run prospects. Rather, it stemmed from financial regulators’ failure to limit leverage in UK pension funds. …The Bank of England, as the entity responsible for overseeing the financial system, bears at least part of the blame for this catastrophe. …the Truss government…was thwarted not by markets, but by a hole in financial regulation — a hole that the Bank of England proved strangely unwilling to plug.

Last but not least, an October 18 editorial by the Wall Street Journal provides additional information.

When the history of Britain’s recent Trussonomics fiasco is written, make sure Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey gets the chapter he deserves. …The BOE has been late and slow fighting inflation… Mr. Bailey’s actions in the past month have also politicized the central bank…in a loquacious statement that coyly suggested the fiscal plan would be inflationary—something Mr. Kwarteng would have disputed. …Meanwhile, members of the BOE’s policy-setting committee fanned out to imply markets might be right to worry about the tax cuts. If this was part of a strategy to influence fiscal policy, it worked. …Mr. Bailey may have been taking revenge against Ms. Truss, who had criticized the BOE for its slow response to inflation as she ran to be the Conservative Party leader this summer. Her proposed response was to consider revisiting the central bank’s legal mandate. The BOE’s behavior the past month has proven her right beyond what she imagined.

So what are the implications of the BoE’s responsibility-dodging actions?

• First, we should learn a lesson about the importance of good monetary policy. None of this mess would have happened if the BoE had not created financial instability with an inflationary approach.
• Second, we should realize that there are downsides to central bank independence. Historically, being insulated from politics has been viewed as the prudent approach since politicians can’t try to artificially goose an economy during election years. But Bailey’s unethical behavior shows that there is also a big downside.

Sadly, all of this analysis does not change the fact that tax cuts are now off the table in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the new Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer have signaled that they will continue Boris Johnson’s pro-tax agenda.

That’s very bad news for the United Kingdom.

P.S. There used to be at least one sensible central banker in the United Kingdom.

P.P.S. But since sensible central bankers are a rare breed, maybe the best approach is to get government out of the business of money.

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The Big Question for Tories (and Republicans): What’s the Alternative to “Free-Market Fundamentalism”?

Because of her support for lower tax rates, I was excited when Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Especially since her predecessor, Boris Johnson, turned out to be an empty-suit populist who supported higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

But I’m not excited anymore.

Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that I’m despondent since the Prime Minister is abandoning (or is being pressured to abandon) key parts of her pro-growth agenda.

For details, check out this Bloomberg report, written by Julian Harris, about the (rapidly disappearing) tax-cutting agenda of the new British Prime Minister.

Westminster’s most hard-line advocates of free markets and lower taxes are looking on in despair as their agenda crumbles… When Liz Truss became prime minister just over five weeks ago, she promised to deliver a radical set of policies rooted in laissez-faire economics — an attempt to boost the UK‘s sluggish rate of growth. Yet her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, faced a quick reality check when his mini-budget, packed with unfunded tax cuts and unaccompanied by independent forecasts, …triggered mayhem… Truss fired Kwarteng and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt as she was forced into a dramatic u-turn over her tax plans. …Truss conceded…and dropped her plan to freeze corporation tax. …Still, some believers are sticking by “Trussonomics”…Patrick Minford,..a professor at Cardiff University, said..“Liz Truss’s policies for growth are absolutely right, and to be thrown off them by a bit of market turbulence is insane.” …Eamonn Butler, co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute, similarly insisted that Truss “is not the source of the problem — she’s trying to cure the problem.”

Eamonn is right.

The United Kingdom faces serious economic challenges. But the problems are the result of bad government policies that already exist rather than the possibility of some future tax cuts.

In a column for the Telegraph, Allister Heath says the U.K.’s central bank deserves a big chunk of the blame.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been doubly unlucky. While almost everybody else in Britain remained in denial, they correctly identified this absurd game for the con-trick that it truly was, warned that it was about to implode and pledged to replace it with a more honest system. Instead of a zombie economy based on rising asset prices and fake, debt-fuelled growth, their mission was to encourage Britain to produce more real goods and services, to work harder and invest more by reforming taxes and regulation. What happened next is dispiriting in the extreme. …Truss and her Chancellor moved too quickly and, paradoxically, given their warnings about the rottenness of the system, ended up pulling out the last block from the Jenga tower, sending all of the pieces tumbling down. …they didn’t crash the economy – it was about to come tumbling down anyway – but they had the misfortune of precipitating and accelerating the day of reckoning. …Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England…, has been deeply unimpressive in all of this, helping to keep interest rates too low… The idea, now accepted so widely, that the price of money must be kept extremely low and quantitative easing deployed at every opportunity has undermined every aspect of the economy and society. …Too few people realise how terribly the easy money, high tax, high regulation orthodoxy has failed.

Allister closes with some speculation about possible alternatives. If the Tories in the U.K. decide to reject so-called “free-market fundamentalism,” what’s their alternative?

He thinks the Labour Party will take control, and with very bad results. Jeremy Corbyn will not be in charge, but his economic policies will get enacted.

If Truss is destroyed, the alternative won’t even be social democracy: it will be Labour, the hard Left, the full gamut of punitive taxation, including of wealth and housing, and even more spending, culminating rapidly in economic oblivion.

That is an awful scenario. Basically turning the United Kingdom into Greece.

I want to take a different approach, though, and contemplate what will happen if the Conservative Party rejects the Truss approach and embraces big-government conservatism.

Here are some questions I’d like them to answer:

• Do you want improved competitiveness and more economic growth?
• If you want more growth, which of your spending increases will lead to those outcomes?
• Which of your tax increases will lead to more competitiveness or more prosperity?
• Will you reform benefit programs to avert built-in spending increases caused by an aging population?
• If you won’t reform entitlements, which taxes will you increase to keep debt under control?
• If you don’t plan major tax increases, do you think the economy can absorb endless debt?

I’m asking these questions for two reasons. First, there are no good answers and I’d like to shame big-government Tories into doing the right thing.

Second, these questions are also very relevant in the United States. Even since the Reagan years, opponents of libertarian economic policies have flitted from one trendy idea to another (national conservatism, compassionate conservatism, kinder-and-gentler conservatism, common-good capitalism, reform conservatism, etc).

To be fair, they usually don’t try to claim their dirigiste policies will produce higher living standards. Instead, they blindly assert that it will be easier to win elections if Republicans abandon Reaganism.

So I’ll close by observing that Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections and his legacy was strong enough that voters then elected another Republican (the same can’t be said for big-government GOPers like Nixon, Bush, Bush, or Trump).

Switching back to the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher repeatedly won election and her legacy was strong enough that voters then elected another Conservative.

The bottom line is that good policy can lead to good political outcomes, whereas bad policy generally leads to bad political outcomes.

P.S. To be sure, there were times when Reagan’s poll numbers were very bad. And the same is true for Thatcher. But because they pursued good policies, economic growth returned and they reaped political benefits. Sadly, it appears that Truss won’t have a chance to adopt good policy, so we will never know if she also would have benefited from a similar economic renaissance.

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The International Monetary Fund’s Tax-Free Bureaucrats Trying to Sabotage Better Tax Policy in the United Kingdom

It is disappointing that the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund routinely advocate for higher taxes and bigger government in nations from all parts of the world (for examples, see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It is disturbing that the IMF engages in bailouts that encourage bad fiscal policy by governments and reckless lending policies by financial institutions.

And it is disgusting that those IMF bureaucrats get tax-free salaries and are thus exempt from the damaging consequences of those misguided policies.

One set of rules for the peasants and one set of rules for the elite.

The latest example of IMF misbehavior revolves around the bureaucracy’s criticism of recently announced tax cuts in the United Kingdom.

A BBC report by Natalie Sherman and Tom Espiner summarizes the controversy.

The International Monetary Fund has openly criticised the UK government over its plan for tax cuts…In an unusually outspoken statement, the IMF said the proposal was likely to increase inequality and add to pressures pushing up prices. …Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled the country’s biggest tax package in 50 years on Friday. But the £45bn cut has sparked fears that government borrowing could surge along with interest rates. …Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister and close ally of Prime Minister Liz Truss, criticised the IMF’s statement. …”The IMF has consistently advocated highly conventional economic policies. It is following this approach that has produced years of slow growth and weak productivity. The only way forward for Britain is lower taxes, spending restraint, and significant economic reform.” …Moody’s credit rating agency said on Wednesday that the UK’s plan for “large unfunded tax cuts” was “credit negative” and would lead to higher, persistent deficits “amid rising borrowing costs [and] a weaker growth outlook”. Moody’s did not change the UK’s credit rating.

So what should be done about the IMF’s misguided interference?

Writing for the Spectator in the U.K., Kate Andrews has some observations about the underlying philosophical and ideological conflict..

…the International Monetary Fund has weighed in on the UK’s mini-Budget, offering a direct rebuke of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts. …its spokesperson said…‘Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture’… But this rebuke from the IMF is the kind of battle the Truss camp might be happy to have. …The IMF takes a political stance on inequality, viewing its reduction as a good thing in itself. Truss and Kwarteng reject this premise – summed up in the Chancellor’s statement last Friday when he called for the end of redistribution politics – and think it’s far more important to focus on ‘growing the size of the pie.’ The IMF’s ‘intervention’ is likely to become an example of the ‘Treasury orthodoxy’ that Truss was so vocal about during the leadership campaign: her belief that a left-wing economic consensus will not tolerate any meaningful shake-up of the tax code or supply-side reform.

Truss and Kwarteng are correct to reject the IMF’s foolish – and immoral – fixation on inequality.

All you really need to know is that the IMF publishes research implying it is okay to hurt poor people if rich people are hurt by a greater amount.

Let’s close by addressing whether tax cuts are bad for Britain’s currency and financial markets

Paul Marshall explained the interaction (and non-interaction) of fiscal and monetary policy in a column for the U.K.-based Financial Times.

Since 2010, the G7 policy framework has been one of tight fiscal and loose monetary policy. …This combination of fiscal austerity and monetary largesse has not been a success. Austerity has not prevented government debt ratios steadily climbing to historic highs. …Meanwhile quantitative easing has fuelled asset inflation for the super-rich and has more or less abolished risk pricing in financial markets. And…it has produced inflation which is still out of control. But now the global policy consensus is in the process of pivoting… A distinctive feature of the UK’s fiscal pivot is the emphasis on reducing the burden of tax on work and business. This is sensible. …the bigger problem for Liz Truss’s government is the Bank of England. It seems that the governor, Andrew Bailey, did not get the memo. Our central bank has been behind the curve since inflation first started to rise sharply in 2021. …The Bank of England effectively lost control of the UK bond market last Thursday when it raised interest rates by 50 basis points, instead of the 75bp that the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank raised by. Its timidity is now having an impact on both the gilt market and sterling. That is the essential context for the market reaction to the mini-Budget. Once you lose market confidence, it is doubly hard to win it back. …a more muscular stance from the BoE to underpin financial market confidence in the UK, even at the expense of some short-term pain.

He is right.

The Bank of England should be focused on trying to unwind its mistaken monetary policy that produced rising prices. That’s the approach that will strengthen the currency.

And Truss and Kwarteng should continue their efforts for better tax policy so the economy can grow faster.

But better tax policy needs to be accompanied by much-need spending restraint, which is what the United Kingdom enjoyed not only during the Thatcher years, but also under Prime Ministers Cameron and May.

P.S. The IMF also interfered in British politics when it tried to sabotage Brexit.

P.P.S. One obvious takeaway is that the IMF should be eliminated.

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The Much-Needed Reincarnation of Thatchernomics

I strongly supported Brexit in part because I wanted the United Kingdom to have both the leeway and the incentive to adopt pro-market policies.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when subsequent Conservative Prime Ministers did nothing (Theresa May) or expanded the burden of government (Boris Johnson).

Where was the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher? Didn’t the Tory Party understand the need to restrain big government?

Perhaps my prayers have finally been answered. After jettisoning Boris Johnson (albeit for scandal rather than bad policy), the Tories elected Liz Truss to lead the nation.

And she appointed Kwasi Kwarteng to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to U.S. Treasury Secretary). The two of them have just unveiled some major changes in U.K. fiscal policy.

Allister Heath’s editorial for the Telegraph has a celebratory tone.

…the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin. The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. …The neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian, redistributionist obsession, the technocratic centrism, the genuflections at the altar of a bogus class war, the spreadsheet-wielding socialists: all were blown to smithereens by Kwarteng’s stunning neo-Reaganite peroration. …All the taboos have been defiled: the fracking ban, the performative 45pc tax rate, the malfunctioning bonus cap, the previous gang’s nihilistic corporation tax and national insurance raids. The basic rate of income tax is being cut, as is stamp duty, that dumbest of levies. …Reforms of this order of magnitude should really have happened after the referendum in 2016, or after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in 2019… Truss..has a fighting chance to save Britain, and her party, from oblivion.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial has a similarly hopeful tone while also explaining the difference between good supply-side policies and failed Keynesian demand-side policies.

This is a pro-growth agenda that is very different than the tax-and spend Keynesianism that has dominated the West’s economic policies for nearly two decades. …Mr. Kwarteng axed the 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax imposed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and canceled a planned increase in the corporate income tax rate to 26% from 19%. …Kwarteng also surprised by eliminating the 45% tax rate on incomes above £150,000. The top marginal rate now will be 40%… A frequent complaint is that there’s no evidence tax cuts for corporations or higher earners will boost demand. Maybe not, but that’s also not the point. Britain doesn’t need a Keynesian demand-side stimulus. It needs the supply-side jolt Ms. Truss is trying to deliver by changing incentives to work and invest. A parallel complaint from the same crowd is that Ms. Truss’s policies—which they just said won’t stimulate demand—will stimulate so much demand the policies will stoke inflation. This has been the experience with debt-fueled fiscal blowouts since the pandemic, but Ms. Truss’s plan is different. She’s not throwing around money to fund consumption. She’s using the tax code to spur production.

The editorial concludes with a key observations.

Britain has become the most important economic experiment in the developed world because Ms. Truss is the only leader willing to abandon a stale Keynesian policy consensus that has produced stagflation everywhere.

Here’s a tweet that captures the current approach, with “liberal” referring to pro-market classical liberalism.

This is the “Singapore-on-Thames” approach that I’ve been promoting for years. Finally!

In a column for Reason, Robert Jackman gives a relatively optimistic libertarian assessment of what to expect from Truss.

…will her arrival in Downing Street bring an end to the big-state, big-spending style of her predecessor? …Within the Westminster village, Truss has long been regarded as a torchbearer for liberty—a reputation that stretches back to her days working at various small-state think tanks. Since entering Parliament in 2010, she has been a member of the Free Enterprise Group… As trade secretary, Truss was responsible for delivering on the good bit of Brexit—jetting around the world to sign tariff-busting trade deals. She was good at it too, quickly securing ambitious agreements with Australia and Japan. …But will Liz Truss’ premiership put Britain back on track to a smaller state? Some things aren’t that simple. …Truss has long been an advocate of relaxing Britain’s punitive planning laws, which would make it easier to build much-needed homes and energy infrastructure.

As you might expect, the analysis from the U.K.-based Economist left much to be desired.

Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, is now implementing Reaganomics…comprising tax cuts worth perhaps £30bn ($34bn) per year (1.2% of gdp)… The fuel that fiscal stimulus will inject into the economy will almost certainly lead the boe to raise interest rates… No matter, say Ms Truss’s backers, because tax cuts will boost productivity. Didn’t inflation fall and growth surge under Reagan? …Ms Truss’s cheerleaders seem to have read only the first chapter of the history of Reaganomics. The programme’s early record was mixed. The tax cuts did not stop a deep recession, yet by March 1984 annual inflation had risen back to 4.8% and America’s ten-year bond yield was over 12%, reflecting fears of another upward spiral in prices. Inflation was anchored only after Congress had raised taxes. By 1987 America’s budget, excluding interest payments, was nearly balanced. By 1993 Congress had raised taxes by almost as much as it had cut them in 1981.

By the way, the article’s analysis of Reaganomics is laughably inaccurate.

Meanwhile, a report in the New York Times, writtten by Eshe Nelson, Stephen Castle and Mark Landler, also has a skeptical tone.

But I’m surprised and impressed that they admit Thatcher’s policies worked in the 1980s.

Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, gambled on Friday that a heavy dose of tax cuts, deregulation and free-market economics would reignite her country’s growth — a radical shift in policy… the new chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, abandoned a proposed rise in corporate taxation and, in a surprise move, also abolished the top rate of 45 percent of income tax applied to those earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $164,000, a year. He also cut the basic rate for lower earners and cut taxes on house purchases. …It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the policy shift from Mr. Johnson’s government, which just one year ago had announced targeted tax increases to offset its increased public spending… The chancellor’s statement in Parliament on Friday underscored the free-market, small-state, tax-cutting instincts of Ms. Truss, who has modeled herself on Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher’s economic revolution in the 1980s turned the economy around.

The article includes 11 very worrisome words.

…so far there has been no indication of corresponding spending cuts.

Amen. Tax cuts are good for growth, but their effectiveness and durability will be in question if there is not a concomitant effort to restrain the burden of spending.

Truss and Kwarteng also should have announced a spending cap, modeled on either the Swiss Debt Brake or Colorado’s TABOR.

P.S. In addition to worrying about whether Truss will copy Thatcher’s track record on spending, I’m also worried about her support for misguided energy subsidies.

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Energy Policy and Big-Government Tories

I don’t like big-government Republicans in the United States, so it naturally follows that I don’t like big-government Tories in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, I wrote just a few days ago about the new leadership race for the Conservative Party in the U.K. and wondered whether either of the candidates has what it takes to reverse Boris Johnson’s failed statism.

I hope one of them is the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher (just as I’ve been waiting decades for another Ronald Reagan).

We will find out relatively quickly. The race for Prime Minister will be decided next month and I will be very interested to see whether the winner fixes two very foolish energy policies.

The Wall Street Journal has a pair of excellent editorials this month.

On August 18, the paper opined about a bone-headed policy to cap energy bills.

Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy policies in recent years, but their cap on household energy bills deserves a special mention. The scheme has been an economic loser, and now it’s becoming a political loser in ways that illustrate the dangers when parties of the right play socialism lite. …The cap traces back to…when Tory Prime Minister Theresa May embarked on a campaign to position the Conservatives as a kinder, gentler party. The effort didn’t work politically. In that year’s snap election she lost the majority… But the price-cap notion lived on and she implemented it in 2019. …The cap has exacerbated economic havoc in Britain’s energy market. As global gas and other commodity prices started to rise in 2021, energy retailers found it impossible to pass to consumers the prices retailers were paying for the energy they were supplying. This has contributed to a wave of bankruptcies… Meanwhile, since it only raises prices at a lag rather than limiting them, the cap leaves households frighteningly exposed to recent movements in global gas prices… The moral: Even half-hearted energy price controls are political losers for conservative parties.

It’s worth noting that energy prices are needlessly high in part because of bad government policy.

Which brings us to the WSJ‘s August 12 editorial.

Reports this week point to spiraling costs for households and businesses this winter, pushing millions of Britons closer to poverty. It’s a steep price for climate alarmism. …Politicians are eager to dodge responsibility for this disaster, and Russia offers a convenient excuse. …But these trends are inseparable from Britain’s homegrown fixation with achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. That’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s worst mistake… Various green charges add £153 to the annual household bill… But other net-zero costs lurk in household energy bills and budgets. The electric grid operator spent about £3.4 billion over the past year…a cost that tends to be higher due to the unreliability of wind and solar, and that’s passed to consumers… Another imponderable is how much lower gas prices would be if Britain produced more itself. Conservative Party administrations have flirted for years with proposals for shale-gas fracking in northern England only to lose their nerve. …So much for those who say conservative parties need to adopt the left’s climate agenda to court younger voters. Net zero has turned the Tories into the party that is impoverishing Britain.

In other words, bad policy is bad politics, which is the mirror image of my contention that good policy is good politics.

We will see whether the Tories have learned that lesson.

P.S. Some otherwise sensible people in the U.S. are flirting with making the same mistake with energy policy. Perhaps the failure of such policies in the U.K. will teach them something (but I won’t hold my breath).

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The United Kingdom Needs another Margaret Thatcher

I was a big fan of Brexit (the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union), but I’m very disappointed about the subsequent failure to create “Singapore-on-Thames.”

The above clip was my “under-reported story of the week,” as part of the most-recent episode of the Square Circle.

The main argument for Brexit was to escape the European Union, which is destined to become a “transfer union.”

To be more specific, the combination of demographic decline and fiscal decay means the bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels eventually will obtain the power to impose taxes in order to redistribute money to failed economies in places such as Italy and Greece.

Indeed, that process already is underway.

By voting for Brexit, the people of the United Kingdom can escape the sinking ship and thus will not be forced to subsidize the bad policy of other nations.

But there was a second reason to support Brexit, which was to give the U.K. the leeway to become the Singapore of Europe.

Would that be a good outcome? Assuming the goal is more prosperity, the answer unambiguously is yes.

As you can see from the chart, Singapore easily has eclipsed the major countries of Europe.

And the idea that the U.K. might copy Singapore’s pro-market policies has been a big part of the Brexit debate, with libertarians and small-government conservatives cheering the possibility and folks on the left dreading that potential outcome.

Any search engine will find thousands of stories about this topic. Here’s a tiny sampling to give readers a flavor.

Sadly, my friends on the left did not need to worry about the U.K. becoming an outpost of laissez-faire policy.

Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in 2019 by promising the “get Brexit done,” but he then proceeded to raise taxes and expand the burden of government spending.

So what’s the current state of play?

In a story for the Washington Post, William Booth writes that Brexit has been a failure.

Boris Johnson…is…the man who “got Brexit done.” So how is that going? What can be said about the post-Brexit Britain that Johnson is leaving behind? …Most people don’t think Brexit has delivered on its lofty promises… With “get Brexit done” as his slogan, Johnson led his party to a landslide election victory. …he oversaw Britain’s departure from the union with one of the hardest possible versions of Brexit… But the government has struggled to show the benefits. …it is clear that although Brexit has not sunk the British economy, it has not produced a boom, either.

But the relevant question is why there was not a boom.

The simple answer, as I noted in the above interview, is that there was no effort to create Singapore-on-Thames. Indeed, the supposedly conservative Tories, under Boris Johnson, went in the opposite direction.

And that explains why supporters of economic liberalization are not very happy. Opining for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Allister Heath is rather depressed.

Statist ideology, historical naivety, cowardice and short-termism have crippled our country. Orthodox thinking has turned out to be wrong in almost all areas that matter, from the economy to energy to planning. …The electorate noticed, kicking Labour out and voting for Brexit, but the politicians let them down. Nothing really changed… Ludwig von Mises, in his Critique of Interventionism, explains how social-democracy is an unstable middle point between capitalism and socialism. This is especially true today. All problems, even when caused by failed Left-wing policy, trigger increasingly hysterical demands for even more state action. …We have a Tory government, but the political climate is veering hard-Left.

This brings us back to what I said in the interview. Boris Johnson has been deposed as leader of the Conservative Party.

Now there’s a race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to see who will be the new party leader – and thus the new Prime Minister.

Both of them claim they will move policy back in the right direction. I’m guessing Ms. Truss is the better option, but my main point in the discussion was that the United Kingdom desperately needs another Margaret Thatcher.

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Evidence for Lower Corporate Tax Rates, Part III

To begin Part III of this series (here’s Part I and Part II), let’s dig into the archives for this video I narrated back in 2007.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, all of the points hold up very well. Indeed, the past 15 years have produced more evidence that my main arguments were correct.

• Lower corporate rates reduce double taxation
• Lower corporate rates reduce taxes on people
• Lower corporate rates boost worker income
• Lower corporate rates boost competitiveness
• Lower corporate rates generate revenue feedback

The good news is that all these arguments helped produce a tax bill that dropped America’s federal corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, from 35 percent to 21 percent.

The bad news is that Biden and most Democrats in Congress want to raise the corporate rate.

In a column for CapX, Professor Tyler Goodspeed explains why higher corporate tax rates are a bad idea. He’s writing about what’s happening in the United Kingdom, but his arguments equally apply in the United States.

…the more you tax something, the less of it you get. …plans to raise Corporation Tax and end relief on new plant and machinery will result in less business investment – and steep costs for households. …Treasury’s current plans to raise the corporate income tax rate to 25% and end a temporary 130% ‘super-deduction’ for new investment in qualifying plant and machinery would lower UK investment by nearly 8%, and reduce the size of the UK economy by more than 2%, compared to making the current rules permanent. …because the economic costs of corporate taxation are ultimately borne both by shareholders and workers, raising the rate to 25% would permanently lower average household wages by £2,500. …the macroeconomic effects of raising the Corporation Tax rate to 25% would alone offset 40% of the static revenue gain over a 10-year period, and as much as 90% over the long run.

To bolster his argument for good policy on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, he then explains that America’s lower corporate tax rate has been a big success.

Critics of corporate tax reform should look to the recent experience of the United States… At the time, I predicted that these changes would raise business investment in new plant and equipment by 9%, and raise average household earnings by $4,000 in real, inflation-adjusted terms. …By the end of 2019, investment had risen to 9.4% above its pre-2017 level. Investment by corporate businesses specifically was up even more, rising to 14.2% above its pre-2017 trend in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, in 2018 and 2019 real median household income in the United States rose by $5,000 – a bigger increase in just two years than in the entire 20 preceding years combined. …What about corporate income tax revenues? …corporate tax revenue as a share of the US economy was substantially higher than projected, at 1.7% versus 1.4%.

If you want more evidence about what happened to corporate tax revenue in America after the Trump tax reform, click here.

Another victory for the Laffer Curve.

Not that we should be surprised. Even pro-tax bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found that lower corporate rates produce substantial revenue feedback.

So let’s hope neither the United States nor the United Kingdom make the mistake of undoing progress.

P.S. The specter of a higher corporate tax in the United Kingdom is especially bizarre. Voters chose Brexit in part to give the nation a chance to break free of the European Union’s dirigiste approach. But instead of adopting pro-growth policies (the Singapore-on-Thames approach), former Prime Minister Boris Johnson opted to increase the burden of taxes and spending. Hopefully the Conservative Party will return to Thatcherism with a new Prime Minister (and hopefully American Republicans will return to Reaganism!).

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The United Kingdom’s Failed Post-War Socialism

I’m in the United Kingdom for the Free Market Road Show and had planned on writing today about the awful economic policies of Boris Johnson, the supposedly Conservative Prime Minister.

Yes, he produced an acceptable Brexit, but otherwise has been a big spender. Sort of the a British version of Trump or Bush.

But I’m going to give Boris a (temporary) pass because I can’t help but vent my spleen about this sign I saw yesterday while touring the Imperial War Museum in London.

As you can imagine, I was irked by this bit of pro-socialist propaganda.

Since when does a government takeover of private industry lead to “a fairer, more caring society”?!?

Maybe that was the intention of the voters who elected Clement Attlee, the Labour Party who became Prime Minister after the 1945 election.

The real-world results, though, were disappointing. Indeed, the sign acknowledges that the post-war recovery was anemic.

But it then put the blame on conscription.

As a sensible Brit would say, this is utter bollocks.

Plenty of other nations drafted men into military service, yet they still managed to enjoy decent growth.

Why did those countries enjoy more prosperity? Because they didn’t copy Clement Attlee’s horrible mistake of nationalizing industry (genuine socialism, by the way).

Indeed, while the United Kingdom was becoming the “sick man of Europe,” West Germany boomed in large part because it went in the other direction, getting rid of dirigiste policies such as price controls.

There is a happy ending to this story.

Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 and privatized industries – in addition to other pro-growth reforms such as spending restraint and tax-rate reductions.

As a result, the United Kingdom in a very short period of time managed to overtake Germany in the Fraser Institute’s rankings for economic liberty.

I’ll close with a thoughtful and magnanimous offer.

I’ve corrected the mistaken wording on the sign at the Imperial War Museum. I hereby offer – free of charge – this new version.

P.S. It’s a long program, but I strongly encourage readers to watch Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, which tells the economic history of the 20th century. You’ll learn how Thatcher saved the U.K. economy and how Reagan saved the U.S. economy.

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The Deadly Impact of Government-Run Health, Part I

I’m not a fan of the government-distorted health system in the United States.

Various laws and programs from Washington have created a massive problem with third-party payer, which makes America’s system very expensive and inefficient.

But it’s possible to have a system that is even worse. Americans can look across the ocean at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.

Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.”

But it’s even worse because doctors and nurses are directly employed by government, which means they have been turned into government bureaucrats.

And government bureaucrats generally don’t have a track record of good performance. That seems to apply to health bureaucrats, as captured by this Alys Denby column for CapX.

Numbers are no way to express a human tragedy, but those in the Ockenden Report into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are nonetheless devastating. The inquiry examined 1,592 incidents since 2000. It found that poor care led to the deaths of 201 babies and nine mothers; 94 babies suffered avoidable brain damage; and one in four cases of stillbirth could have had a different outcome. That’s hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of families suffering unimaginable pain, all on the watch of ‘Our NHS’. …the report is strewn with examples of individual cruelty and incompetence. Bereaved parents…were given excuses, false information and even blamed for their own child’s death. The Health Secretary has said that vital clinical information was written on post-it notes that were swept into the bin by cleaners. …The NHS has a culture of arrogance, sanctimony and impunity.

And here are some excerpts from a 2021 article in National Review by Cameron Hilditch.

The NHS has proven itself comprehensively and consistently incapable of dealing with a regular flu season, something that crops up at the same predictable time of year in every country north of the equator. It has long been obvious that Britain’s single-payer health-care system isn’t fit for purpose even in normal times, much less during a global pandemic. Yet the NHS’s failures are systematically ignored. …age-standardized survival rates in the U.K. for the most common kinds of cancer are well below those of other developed countries, which translates into thousands of needless deaths… The excess deaths that the U.K. is suffering…along with the crushing physical and mental burdens borne by British doctors and nurses ultimately redound to this long-term failure of British culture. By transforming a medical institution into a cultural institution for the sake of forging a new, progressive national identity, Britons have underwritten decades of deadly failure.

This is damning information.

To be sure, mistakes will happen in any type of health system. But when government runs the show, the odds of appropriate feedback are much lower.

If you don’t believe me, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Britain’s Big-Government Tories

After the people of the United Kingdom voted to escape the European Union, I wondered whether the Conservative Party would “find a new Margaret Thatcher” to enact pro-market reforms and thus “take advantage of a golden opportunity” to “prosper in a post-Brexit world.”

The answer is no.

The current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, deserves praise for turning the Brexit vote into Brexit reality, but his fiscal policy has been atrocious.

Not only is he failing to be another Margaret Thatcher, he’s a bigger spender than left-leaning Tory leaders such as David Cameron and Theresa May.

Let’s look at some British media coverage of how Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) have sided with government over taxpayers.

Allister Heath of the Telegraph has a brutal assessment of their profligacy.

Rishi Sunak’s message, repeated over and over again, as he unveiled a historic, epoch-defining rise in public spending financed by ruinous tax increases. It was a Labour Budget with a Tory twist and the kind of Spending Review that Gordon Brown would have relished… the cash was sprinkled in every possible direction. Sunak is Chancellor, but he was executing Boris Johnson’s cakeist vision: a meddling, hyperactive, managerialist, paternalistic and almost municipal state which refuses to accept any limits to its ambition or ability to spend. …The scale of the tax increases is staggering. …This will propel the tax burden from 33.5 per cent of GDP before the pandemic to 36.2 per cent by 2026-27, its highest since the early 1950s… The picture on spending is equally grim: we are on course for a new normal of around 41.6 per cent of GDP by 2026-27, the largest sustained share of GDP since the late 1970s. …The Budget and Spending Review are thus a huge victory for Left-wing ideas, even if the shift is being implemented by Right-wing Brexiteers who have forgotten that the economic case for Brexit wasn’t predicated on Britain becoming more like France or Spain. …Labour shouldn’t be feeling too despondent: the party may not be in office, but when it comes to the economy and public spending, they are very much in power.

Writing for CapX, James Heywood explains one of the adverse consequences of big-government Toryism.

Simply stated, the U.K. will go from bad to worse in the Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index.

…in the Cameron-Osborne era, the Conservatives focused on heavily on making Britain competitive and business-friendly, with significant cuts to the headline rate of corporation tax. …in his recent Tory conference speech, Boris Johnson trumpeted the virtues of an ‘open society and free market economy’, promising that his was a government committed to creating a ‘low tax economy’.  Unfortunately, when it comes to UK tax policy the direction of travel is concerningly divorced from the rhetoric. The latest iteration of the US-based Tax Foundation’s annual International Tax Competitiveness Index placed the UK 22nd out of 37 OECD countries when it comes to the overall performance of our tax system. …Nor does the UK’s current ranking factor in the Government’s plans for future tax rises. …the headline rate of corporation tax had fallen to 19% and was set to fall to 17% by 2020. That further fall had already been cancelled during Sajid Javid’s brief stint as Chancellor, in order to pay for additional NHS spending. At the last Budget, Rishi Sunak went much further, setting out plans to gradually raise the rate from 19% to 25% in April 2023. That is a huge tax measure by anyone’s standards… On top of that we have the recently announced Health and Social Care Levy… If we factor all these new measures into the Tax Foundation’s Competitiveness Index, the UK falls to a dismal 30th out of 37 countries.

For what it’s worth, the United Kingdom’s competitiveness decline will be very similar to the drop in America’s rankings if Biden’s fiscal plan is enacted.

In other words, there’s not much difference between the left-wing policy of Joe Biden and the (supposedly) right-wing policy of Britain’s Conservative Party.

No wonder a British cartoonist thought it was appropriate to show Rishi Sunak morphing into Gorden Brown, the high-tax, big-government Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair.

I’ll close with the observation that conservatives and libertarians in the United Kingdom need to create their own version of the no-tax-hike pledge.

That pledge, organized by Americans for Tax Reform, has helped protect many (but not all) Republicans from politically foolish tax hikes.

It is good politics to have a no-tax pledge, but I’m much more focused on the fact that opposing tax hikes is good policy.

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Boris Johnson Is the U.K.’s “Tax Collector for the Welfare State”

The great Margaret Thatcher famously observed that the problem with socialism is that governments eventually “run out of other people’s money.”

But they can do a lot of damage before they reach that point.

We know from U.S. experience that Republicans can be very profligate. Well, the same problem exists with the Conservative Party on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I wrote earlier this year that Boris Johnson was letting the burden of government spending increase much faster than needed to keep pace with inflation.

And when politicians spend too much money, it’s almost inevitable that they will then try to grab more money from taxpayers.

And that’s exactly what the Prime Minister is proposing, as reported by Stephen Castle for the New York Times.

Mr. Johnson is widely expected to break his vow not to increase taxes when he announces a plan to bolster the nation’s social care services… Even before the announcement, the blistering dissent from members of his own Conservative Party has underscored the problems that lie ahead for a government that has ramped up borrowing during the pandemic yet faces huge pressure to spend… Britain’s creaking National Health Service, which was already strained before the pandemic, now has a massive backlog of routine treatment and operations that had to be postponed. On Monday the government announced a cash injection of £5.4 billion, or $7.4 billion, to help deal with that issue. …His proposals are likely to cap the amount any British citizen pays for social care over their lifetime. That would prevent many from having to sell their homes to pay for care, but would also mean investing more public money, mainly through raising taxes.

So what do the actual conservatives in the Conservative Party think about Johnson’s proposal for more taxes and more spending?

They are not happy.

Perhaps the biggest danger for Mr. Johnson is the hostility of fiscal conservatives on the right of his party, who object to any tax being increased, including one senior cabinet minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. …Mr. Sunak is also anxious to reign in spending, a view that is popular with the right wing of the Conservative Party. “He believes there is a moral and political premium on not raising taxes, not raising spending and getting borrowing under control,” said Professor Bale, who added this was “partly because he knows that this where the beating heart of the Conservative parliamentary party lies.”

Here are some more details about teh fight inside the Conservative Party, as reported by Edward Malnick of the U.K.-based Telegraph.

Senior Conservatives were threatening open warfare over Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s planned tax increase… Ministers, government aides and backbenchers lined up to denounce a planned National Insurance rise which was privately described by senior figures as “idiotic”, with one Cabinet member declaring the proposal “morally, economically and politically wrong”. …Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister, said: “Of all the ways to break manifesto tax pledges to fund the NHS and social care, raising NIC must be the worst. In this time of crisis, we need a zero-based review of what the state does and how it is funded.” …Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, feared that if Mr Johnson pushed ahead with the move the Conservatives would end up presiding over “the biggest tax rises since Clement Attlee”. …Another Tory MP suggested the Chancellor was concerned about Britain becoming a continental-style economy with unsustainable public spending and state intervention.

So how do Johnson’s allies respond?

With the same language one might have expected from Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-core statist who used to lead the Labor Party.

A government source said: “The NHS needs more money. By the time of the next election there could be 13 million people on waiting lists if we don’t act.”

In other words, the more government fails, the more money it should get (which also could be a description of Joe Biden’s fiscal policy).

P.S. What I wrote earlier this year is worth repeating.

Because of my strong support for Brexit, I was very happy that Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in late 2019. And he then delivered an acceptable version of Brexit, so that worked out well. However, it definitely doesn’t look like he will fulfill my hopes of being a post-Brexit, 21st century version of Margaret Thatcher.

The bottom line is that I wanted an independent United Kingdom to become Singapore on the Thames. Instead, Johnson seems to want his country to be Paris on the Thames.

P.P.S. I never thought I would miss the fiscal policy of two moderate former Prime Ministers, David Cameron and Theresa May.

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Boris Johnson’s Fiscal Policy: Politics over Prudence

Two years ago, I wrote about how two former Prime Ministers in the United Kingdom, David Cameron and Theresa May, did a very good job of restraining spending.

On average, spending increased by only 1.8 percent per year last decade, which helped to substantially reduce the fiscal burden of government relative to the private economy.

That was an impressive result, and it adds to the collection of success stories showing what happens when governments obey fiscal policy’s Golden Rule.

That was the good news.

The bad news is that spending restraint evaporated once the pandemic began.

The worse news is that the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has no intention of restoring fiscal discipline now that the coronavirus is fading away.

The Wall Street Journal opined on the new budget that was just released by the supposedly conservative government.

London has spent some £407 billion ($568 billion) on pandemic relief since last year… This has blown a hole in public finances, with the fiscal deficit expected to be around 10% of GDP this year. …Britain’s political class, and especially the governing Conservative party, …faces pressure to “pay for” all this relief. …an increase to the corporate profits tax rate to 25% from 19%…freezing previously announced increases in the thresholds for personal income-tax brackets. This tax hike on the sly is estimated to raise an additional £18 billion starting next year from beleaguered households who discover inflation pushing them into higher brackets. A holiday on the stamp duty on property purchases will expire in October, walloping households as the recovery is meant to begin. …The government’s Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that by 2026 tax revenue as a share of GDP will be 35%, the highest since 1969. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think tank, estimates that the additional £29 billion in annual revenue expected by 2026 amounts to the largest tax increase in any budget since 1993. …This Tory government came to power promising to unleash Britain’s entrepreneurial businesses for a post-Brexit growth spurt, and freeing those animal spirits is even more important after the pandemic. A super-taxing budget is a huge gamble.

The WSJ focused on all the tax increases.

Allister Heath’s column in the Daily Telegraph informs us that the bad news on taxes is a predictable and inevitable consequence of being weak on spending restraint.

For the past 50 years, the Tory party had believed that high tax rates, especially on income and profits, were bad for the economy and had strived to cut them. Today, this is no longer true… The Tory taboo on increasing direct rates of taxation…is over… Britain will continue its shift to the Left on economics, sinking ever-deeper into a social-democratic, low growth, European-style model… Johnson, sadly, is planning to increase spending permanently by two percentage points of GDP and taxes by one. He is a big-government Conservative… the main problem facing the public finances longer-term isn’t the economic scarring from the pandemic, but the fact that the Tories are determined to keep increasing spending as if Covid never happened. …Reaganomics is over in Britain, dead and buried, as is much of the economic side of Thatcherism.

Here’s a chart from the U.K.’s Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), which shows both taxes and spending as a share of gross domestic output (GDP).

I’ve added some text to show that there was fiscal progress under Thatcher, Cameron, and May, along with fiscal profligacy under Blair (and during the coronavirus, of course).

I also used OBR data to construct this chart, which shows inflation-adjusted spending over the past five decades, as well as projections until 2025.

The most worrisome part of the chart (and the biggest indictment of Boris Johnson) is the way spending climbs at a rapid rate in the final four years.

P.S. Because of my strong support for Brexit, I was very happy that Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in late 2019. And he then delivered an acceptable version of Brexit, so that worked out well. However, it definitely doesn’t look like he will fulfill my hopes of being a post-Brexit, 21st century version of Margaret Thatcher.

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