Krugman Blog- Margaret Thatcher’s True Heir
As Bruce Bartlett points out, the Margaret Thatcher American conservatives admire bears little resemblance to the British Prime Minister of the same name. In particular, she did hardly anything to scale down the British welfare state (although she did make a hash of retirement security more on that in a later post). Heres one indicator, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (pdf):
What she did do was redistribute the burden of taxation downward, cutting top income tax rates while raising consumption taxes, which fall most heavily on low incomes. Her downfall came with the poll tax, a drastically regressive tax the same amount for everyone, regardless of income that was too much even for her own party.
And what that means is that her truest heir in America is
Bobby Jindal, the not-so-whizzy whiz-kid governor of Louisiana, who proposed scrapping his states income tax and replacing it with sales taxes.
Grover Norquist loved it:
Grover Norquist, the intellectual leader of the anti-tax crowd in Washington, had praised Jindals plan as the boldest, most pro-growth state tax reform in U.S. history. He noted that it was particularly significant, because with Obama positioned to veto anything resembling the House GOPs budget for the next several years, Louisiana might be Republicans best chance to show off their tax ideas on the state level.
The national media and Acela-corridor crowd continue to focus on the bickering Washington, but they can learn what real tax reform looks like by looking to Louisiana, Norquist said.
But strange to say, its not just Acela riders who hate this idea; so do the citizens of Louisiana, who disapprove by 63 to 27 percent. Jindals own approval has collapsed, so hes having his own poll tax moment.
Anyway, if Republicans more generally should decide to emulate the true Thatcher record, Im sure Democrats would be delighted.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/margaret-thatchers-true-heir/