Truss’ Tax Cut “Fiasco”

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss withdrew her plan to reduce the Brits’ top tax bracket from 45% on annual incomes above £150,000 (roughly $169,000) to 40% amid a panicky self-serving outcry from the liberal Labourites and too many entrenched pseudo-conservatives among the Tories. The rest of her tax reduction and energy subsidy package seems to remain intact.

In the scheme of things politics, though, it seems to me that withdrawing that top tier tax cut is a small price to pay in order to get the rest of the tax cuts to pass. And it may be (though I frankly doubt it) that Truss deliberately overbid her tax cut package in order to allow herself be talked down a little bit to get to a package that could pass after her concession but that could not pass had she made her bid from the jump without the cut from 45%.

Regardless, the biggest error, and one that no one in Socialist Great Britain is decrying, is that enormous energy subsidy to businesses and households, ostensibly to help them pay for skyrocketing energy costs. Sure, the subsidy is supposed to be sunsetted after two years, but most of us know how well sunsetting works with subsidies.

Instead, the subsidies will serve only to maintain the current sky high energy prices to the end users and to consumers in all economic strata, all of whom must buy food, and housing, and transportation—all of which depend on energy.

The smarter way to reduce those energy costs would have been to push further deregulation of British domestic fossil fuel energy production and delivery. Truss is moving to allow fracking to resume, but that’s only a start.

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