Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
It's no surprise after 12 years in government:

The party gets tired of the 'rigour' of government, and becomes more shambolic in execution and messaging.
The public gets tired of old messages and old prescriptions that have not realised the gains the party promised.


I don't know exactly how much of the current furore is media hyperventilation and manufactured outrage vs a complete collapse of discipline and competence in the tory party. The two are in tension, and its not immediately obvious to me where the balance lies.
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The current crisis seems to be caused principally by:

The mini-budget making the UK a policy outlier which is never a good place to be with regards the bond/gilt vigilantes.
The mini-budget being a significant departure in policy for a succession Prime Minister with a 'caretaker' mandate for the last electoral manifesto.

The current crisis obviously has deeper and broader causes than a proposed budget, reflecting global conditions and decades of structural policy. It definitely seems the budget specifically is responsible for some market movements and moreover a big stink among the electorate.

Comment - I support the removal of the 45p top-rate IT as I don't believe it is moral to remove so much earnings from anyone, and I believe it would have been at worst revenue neutral, but you can't argue with manufactured outrage. So I would not have done it now, for a mere ?2b change.
Of course this is a rather unpopular position. Not even the US Republican Party commonly makes this kind of categorical argument for its tax cut proposals, since it is an intuition even among conservative voters globally that high earners should pay a higher proportion of income in taxes. Maybe that's why this month the UK government announced the cancellation of the rate drop because "it is clear that the abolition of the 45p tax rate has become a distraction from our overriding mission to tackle the challenges facing our country." But yes, cutting base income tax rates and corporate tax will cause at least ten times the shortfall of dropping the top income tax bracket, probably because traditional income tax does not capture the surplus from high earners well. The totality of the proposal is still, reportedly, the largest tax cut proposal in the UK for 50 years - hardly chicken feed. It's not wild in the history of supply-siding tax cuts, but it's virtually always terrible fiscal policy.

Latest news is that the corporate cut was dropped as well.

It's always tricky to balance values with economics. Some argue that the fundamental tenant-landlord relationship is immorally inequitable and we should move toward its abolition, but understand that such policies would have the short-term effect of crushing housing availability, which is a more important consideration.

At any rate, cutting taxes while borrowing tens of billions to pay for energy subsidies during a time of low unemployment, significant currency depreciation, domestic asset dumping, and central bank rate increases is Argentina-tier economics. Like Argentina, the United Kingdom is bound to always have a bright future ahead.

Beyond the UK, this paper may be proving prescient.
https://www.bis.org/publ/work656.pdf