Margaret Thatcher’s True Heir (Krugman)

[steve2470]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/margaret-thatchers-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). Here’s 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 state’s income tax and replacing it with sales taxes.

[Scuba]

1. Oh Bobby's a whiz kid. He'll be glad to whiz on you.