Learning the Lessons of the British Fiasco
As a teacher, I like to think people are capable of learning lessons in life, not just from the distant past, but from what goes on around us in the here and now. And what just happened to former Prime Minister Liz Truss in Great Britain, and to the political party she led for a few short weeks, has a lesson in it for the United States and in particular for the Republican Party, which is running on an agenda that literally was crafted by the same people who wrote Truss’ agenda and has the same discredited ideas at its core.
What is the lesson? Trickle-down economics doesn’t work. And in a world of financial markets that react to information instantaneously, the time it takes to discover that these policies don’t work can be measured in hours and days, but the damage done to ordinary people, to education and healthcare, lasts for years, and sometimes, as appears to be the case in Britain, can’t be undone.
Here in the United States we thought we had learned this from the dismal economic performance of tax cuts for the rich paid for with borrowed money — in the Reagan administration, in the George W. Bush administration, in the Trump administration. But in the dark corners of the billionaire-funded right, and specifically at the Heritage Foundation — the inside-the-Beltway home of bad billionaire ideas — tax cuts for the rich, paid for by everyone else, remains their “solution” to every economic problem.
It was to the Heritage Foundation that an ambitious and unprincipled British politician named Liz Truss came in the summer of 2021 as she contemplated a run at the prime ministership. And it is these very same ideas that underlie the agenda that House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has promised to enact if the Republicans win control of the House in November’s election.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at what passes for McCarthy’s policy manifesto, the House GOP’s “Commitment to America,” and there you will find Liz Truss herself in these words: “Bring stability to the economy through pro-growth tax and deregulatory policies.”
Former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow agreed that Truss’ supply-side economic growth plan “looks a lot like the basic thrust of Kevin McCarthy’s ‘Commitment to America’ plan”; he said so on Fox News. These words are exactly what Truss promised and briefly enacted — policies she and her extremist right-wing friends called “pro-growth” but that devastated the British economy in a matter of days by causing Britain’s currency to collapse and interest rates to skyrocket. What was at the core of Truss’ policies? Unfunded tax cuts for the rich. And that is exactly what McCarthy means when he writes the words “pro-growth tax policies.”
This should surprise no one because the Heritage Foundation that advised Truss also helped McCarthy write his “Commitment to America.” As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said when it was released, “The Heritage Foundation is proud to have worked with Leader McCarthy on this agenda and we are ready to fight for these ideas in the next Congress.”
What does McCarthy mean by “pro-growth deregulatory policies”? Probably something like Truss’ proposal to deregulate fracking in Britain, which proved so unpopular in her own Conservative Party that it led to a physical melee among Conservatives on the floor of the House of Commons, which was the final humiliation that led to Truss’ resignation the next day.
The question is: Will Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans learn from any of this? So far, it doesn’t look like it. They continue as if the fiasco of their intellectual twins in Great Britain never happened. It is up to us, the people of the United States, to learn the lesson of the Liz Truss/Heritage Foundation debacle and vote accordingly in November.
