If we could just make a short but important point?
There’s the Tory tax-cutting rhetoric and then there’s the tax-rising reality: between 2019 and 2024 the Conservatives delivered the largest rise in tax as a share of GDP of any postwar parliament (3.3%, equivalent to more than £3,000 per household).
Things have got better over this time period, have they? We are, for example, gaining more and better public services? Frolic more freely now that our wallets are lighter?
We’re not? Ah.
More taxation - that is, more ripped untimely from fructifying in our own pockets to then be spent as others insist, not as we do - doesn’t improve matters.
So, there seems to be a very strong indication that increasing the tax burden so that more of society’s resources are spent by the political system and the bureaucracy doesn’t make things better. So, let’s not do that then.
Of course, we are not anarcho-capitalists here so we do agree that some government - therefore some tax - is a necessity. But less of both sounds like a jolly good idea given the success of having more.
Tim Worstall