John Gizzi‘s latest Human Events article analyzes the British Conservative government’s new budget plan.
In a move that Republican candidates for Congress and the presidency might take note of, Britain’s Conservative Government yesterday unveiled its budget — pro-growth, cutting taxes on business and the nation’s highest wage-earners. Following budgets that focused on major spending cuts to tame the country’s record-high debt, the new budget “unashamedly backs business,” declared Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, chief architect of the pro-growth manifesto.
The dramatic, tax-cutting budget comes as Britain is still on its austerity plan through which it hopes to close its deficit in seven years and the nation still faces a downgrade of its credit rating from two agencies. It is especially heartening to those on the right of the Conservative Party, many of whom have felt that Prime Minister David Cameron is more akin to centrist Conservative leaders of the past — notably Prime Minister Harold MacMillan — than to their heroine, Lady Margaret Thatcher.
But this latest budget of the Cameron government outdoes anything on the economic front that came under the “Iron Lady’s” reign. It could even be characterized as a British salute to Jack Kemp, the late New York congressman and 1996 Republican vice presidential candidate who led the Republican Party to embrace the concept of tax cuts as a means of raising revenue through the Kemp-Roth legislation of 1978 (which Ronald Reagan later turned into policy in 1981).
