Spending

Having written here at least once before that Boris Johnson is the heir to Blair, my first thought on the Prime Minister's tax-to-spend announcement on the NHS and social care is a petty one: I told you so. The striking thing about making the Boris-Blair comparison is how resistant some people are to it. Among Bozza fans on the Leave-voting right, there is often fury at the suggestion that their man, the hero of Brexit, is anything like the Europhile they used to call ‘Bliar’. On the left, there is an almost pathological determination to believe that a Tory PM must, by definition, be a small-state free-marketeer intent on starving and privatising public services. That latter point is why Labour people sometimes struggle to respond to Johnson.

Over the last month, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed roughly $4 trillion in new tax hikes. That is meant to the cover, at least partially, the $7 trillion in spending increases he’ll impose if he wins the White House. As part of his tax hike plan, Biden promises his tax increases won’t hit any American who earns under $400,000. But they will. Even the Washington Post analysis of Biden’s tax plan concedes that his tax plan will impact 82 percent of American earners if enacted as proposed.The reason it will hit so many Americans is because of the change he proposes to corporate taxes. There is broad consensus among tax experts that such an increase will lead to corporations ‘reducing investment returns and cutting working wages’.