Bizarre to hear the media and Opposition mobs out to pull down the PM by forcing her to tear up her pledge to keep the UK competitive on business tax rates.
John Redwood MP writes: As always the Opposition wants to do the EU’s dirty work to make us less competitive and get in the way of us attracting more business investment and more jobs.
The think tanks and forecasters who want taxes up tell us the deficit will otherwise be too big. If they have their way they will put us into a longer and deeper downturn which will mean a higher deficit, not a lower.
Over the last 2 years the OBR has massively over forecast the budget deficit and used these wrong forecasts to push a Chancellor into higher taxes. More accurate forecasting would conclude now that a lower business tax rate would be better for growth and for total tax revenue.
This year I disagreed again with the OBR deficit forecast. Unlike the two previous years when they massively overstated the deficit pushing the then Chancellor to tax rises, I thought this year they were too low. They will now need to increase forecast substantially. If we added tax rises to the big squeeze the Bank’s higher rates and the energy price surge is bringing we could well end up with an even larger deficit. Making the downturn longer and deeper would cut tax revenues and increase benefit spending.
