Low taxation underpins job-creating economies and can be used to build strong and generous societies.
It can be impossible to sell the best of causes if the terms of debate are disadvantageously framed against them. If tax cuts versus extra public spending is presented as a choice between a wealthy man affording a new car and a pensioner getting better healthcare the public spender owns the moral high ground.
Year after year Britain’s liberal left has successfully presented the ‘tax-cut-versus-spending’ debate in a similarly distorted way. Part of the reason for their success is the assistance they receive from the media establishment’s ‘red corner style of questioning’.
Powerful arguments for lower taxation have gone unheard and the wastefulness of much extra public spending has gone unnoticed. A two-pronged assault is required to change the terms of debate.
Targeted tax cuts can be shown to have a purpose…
Tax cuts will remain relatively unpopular if they are only seen as a route to that better car for that already wealthy man.
Lower taxation also needs to be understood as the essential underpinning of a strong, job-creating economy. The world’s fastest growing economies are low tax economies. Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ renaissance owes at least as much to tax cuts as EU subsidy. When economies stutter it is the poor who suffer most: unemployment has always been a regressive phenomenon and funding for the government programmes upon which vulnerable people depend becomes difficult to sustain.
Targeted tax cuts can be the most popular kind of tax cuts. A morally purposeful tax cut… to eliminate the marriage penalty… to remove the work disincentives facing poorer families… or to protect the environment… is always going to be more popular than a crudely-described tax cut.
A September 2004 YouGov survey found that Britons strongly preferred a local charity to spend £200 of their money than the welfare state. That’s a preference that small government conservatives should work with.
…and the wastefulness of much public spending needs to be exposed…
Conservatives need to unendingly expose the extent of fat in the British state. Government’s flabbiness takes many forms:
- Mismanaged infrastructure projects, IT overhauls that don’t work and Domes that no-one wants to visit are examples of wasteful spending…
- There are the ineffective programmes like Labour's New Deal that are never shut down…
- There is the unionised bureaucracy of people employed to administer government programmes and churn taxpayers' money. This bureaucracy has become as powerful and as dependent a lobby for the welfare state as those it is meant to be helping…
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