The second part of a mini-series on ConservativeHome this week about how the Government can help Britain’s economy to grow faster.
We now have created a situation where the OBR is effectively setting the immediate stance of fiscal policy. If economic expectations are poor, the finances look poor, so austerity or tax hikes follow – but these in turn make the economy and finances worse.
Rather than an ideological approach, these four ideals – pragmatism, stewardship, One Nation and empowerment – should be the foundations of Conservative economic policy.
There’s an obvious precedent for the sorts of pro-growth policies that Truss is offering: that of Ronald Reagan and his supply-side revolution.
The first of a series of five articles on ConservativeHome this week about the main challenges that await the new Prime Minister.
Want an example of economic fatalism? Just read reactions to the Foreign Secretary criticising the Bank of England’s inflation performance.
The effect of benefit policy changes on the incomes of working-age adults and children since 2010 has been an average loss of £375 per year compared with a boost to pensioners of £510 per year.
It needs to pull the help it has already provided into an account that shows the scale of the adjustment we are going through.
it is almost impossible to disentangle any effect from the much larger shock resulting from pandemic and war.
The shock-absorber is a looser fiscal policy. Although the budget deficit is higher than one would like, the good news is that it is falling sharply.
My instinct last week was that he tried too hard to please the Tory press. Nothing’s that’s happened since has suggested otherwise.
Pandemic and war, like two horsemen of the Apocalypse, leave the Chancellor scrabbling for a response.
Re-calibrating policies to account for the reality of conflict and warfare today could not be more urgent.
Lumping more onto the UK’s tax burden – already at the highest sustained level seen in peacetime – cannot be the answer.
As Robert Kennedy put it in 1968: ‘it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’.