[HN Gopher] 'Liz Truss hasn't understood a word I wrote', says P...
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'Liz Truss hasn't understood a word I wrote', says PM's favourite
author
Author : enviclash
Score : 14 points
Date : 2022-10-01 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Think the UK will get 3 Prime Ministers in 30 days?
| spzb wrote:
| More frighteningly we might manage to make it three
| premierships with only two PMs if Boris Johnson's saviour dream
| comes true.
| enviclash wrote:
| I have no word for how both terrifying and hilarious that
| could be.
| enviclash wrote:
| It does not sound unrealistic at all.
| [deleted]
| tuatoru wrote:
| "Perlstein said that, if she read his books with the
| attentiveness she claimed, she would not have risked our pensions
| and mortgages with a naive belief that tax cuts would stimulate
| economic growth and raise revenue for the Treasury. Far from
| paying for themselves, Reagan's income and capital gains tax cuts
| in the early 1980s sent public debt from 26 per cent GDP in 1980
| to 41 per cent GDP by 1988."
|
| This suggests quite the opposite to me. Truss has said repeatedly
| and clearly that she wants to shrink government.
|
| If she has read Perlstein's books, and also Naomi Klein's _The
| Shock Doctrine_ [1], she is merely applying what she has read.
|
| No one should be surprised either now, or soon when the Bristish
| PM says that "debt has to be cut, so we are privatising the NHS
| and cutting pensions".
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
| enviclash wrote:
| "And so it has proved again and again. Reagan's tax cuts,
| George W. Bush's tax cuts, Donald Trump's tax cuts all failed
| to deliver." Polls also show drops in popularity. What exactly
| do you think she got right?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Giving money to the people who will pay for her next election
| campaign.
|
| > In the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the editor of Public
| Interest, was explicit that politics must trump economics.
| The political advantage tax cuts would provide to the
| Republicans was so historically imperative they should be
| blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. 'The neo-
| Conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped
| with by liberal interregnums
|
| Even if they get kicked out as a result, that just gives them
| some economic chaos to complain about from opposition. They
| kicked off this latest decade of austerity because Labour
| paid nurses too much and so caused a global recession.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Preparing the ground to massively cut the size of the state.
| "Small enough to drown in a bathtub" has been the goal of her
| ilk for generations.
|
| I thought I had clearly said this.
|
| (There is a great blind spot in the thinking. Military
| defence, public order, the court system for arbitration
| between billionaires, essential infrastructure like national
| roads, and more besides: all of these must be state
| functions. Truss and her co-religionists haven't heard the
| maxim, "be careful what you wish for, because you might get
| it.")
| googlryas wrote:
| This happens all the time and is just part of the boring non-news
| cycle.
|
| 1) important person X says their favorite Y is Z.
|
| 2) creator of Z has different politics than X so they do an
| interview saying person X is stupid and doesn't understand Z.
|
| 3) the cycle moves on 5 minutes later.
| enviclash wrote:
| Also repeated from another angle: since the 1970s it is a known
| story that such tax cuts do not deliver the promise.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's correct - as long as she can't shrink the government and
| reduce spending.
|
| From my experience, governments rarely get something done, so
| it's unlikely she will have enough political power to cut the
| government down.
|
| I'm not following the UK news, but it sounds to me like she cut
| down taxes to create an emergency situation and force the
| political apparatus to cut down on spending or face record high
| debt.
|
| Hats off if it works: if it doesn't, I think western governments
| are doomed to grow larger and larger until their host country
| collapses, productive people flee somewhere else and who's left
| will rebuild a smaller government from the ashes starting the
| cycle again.
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