[kreuzberger]

I must've misheard her when I thought she said, "that's not funny."

[Youngian]

VP Harris on the ropes, will Kamala recover from this slight?

[davidjay]

As with Johnson, can we get rid of the question mark please?

[mattomac]

Capable black woman runs for high office
Criticised by incapable former politician

As for these European allies, they clearly see the alternative or are they too blinded by dare I say race.

[Crabcakes]

Fuck me. Truss was considering stopping NHS cancer treatment to save money and her tax cuts for the rich.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 01932.html

[Bones McCoy]

Fuck me. Truss was considering stopping NHS cancer treatment to save money and her tax cuts for the rich.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 01932.html

Hey pensioners, stack THAT against your lost winter fuel payments.
Let's see what you could have won!!


Has anybody sane commented on this in the press.
It's the sort of move that would immediately relegate us to a "Poor country with rich people".

It's also likely to trigger a flood of highly skilled medical professionals to serious countries.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Also - the cocaine and alcohol abuse...

[Andy McDandy]

Also, remember that "the markets" are people too. Even your most wired and sleep deprived broker isn't going to get behind that.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not one to defend Truss normally, but I saw someone suggest (plausibly, to me) that this may have been something that the civil service suggested as the sort of cut she’d have to make if she did her tax cuts.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

It doesn't matter. Truss has reached the stage of public opprobrium that any accusation against her is a given. I have already seen memes of a laughing Truss 'switching off the life-support machines'. She's a goner in the eyes of the public, friends and opponents alike.

Even more damaging is the evidence of Soft Walter's utter and complete stupidity in suggesting a 20p flat rate of tax and plugging a nuclear submarine into the national electricity grid.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

[Watchman]

KK “I’m just nipping to the toilet with this box of Kleenex”

[Tubby Isaacs]

It doesn't matter. Truss has reached the stage of public opprobrium that any accusation against her is a given. I have already seen memes of a laughing Truss 'switching off the life-support machines'. She's a goner in the eyes of the public, friends and opponents alike.

Even more damaging is the evidence of Soft Walter's utter and complete stupidity in suggesting a 20p flat rate of tax and plugging a nuclear submarine into the national electricity grid.

Labour could have really done with Truss winning by a small margin.

Flat tax is as mad as plugging nuclear submarines into the national grid. Even places that do this sort of thing (US states with a flat zero rate income tax, at the most extreme) have to get tax from somewhere. The overall difference between California (highest personal tax rates) and the three states with zero income tax (Washington, Texas and Florida) isn't as big as people think.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-h ... rden/20494

[Crabcakes]

Not one to defend Truss normally, but I saw someone suggest (plausibly, to me) that this may have been something that the civil service suggested as the sort of cut she’d have to make if she did her tax cuts.

Almost anyone else, I’d agree. But the quote also points out Truss shouting at her staff when they told her that the money wasn’t there that they were wrong, she knew it was there, and they had to find it.

That makes me think she would have done this, and worse, because she was absolutely unhinged. Also, I think her bizarre behaviour since being booted out is evidence that everything pre-PM was a case of eye-watering ineptitude being masked by a combination of competent underlings and civil servants mitigating the damage and the distraction of Johnson wobbling his way to his own doom. If we’d have seen more of the true Truss before she became PM - and there was already a lot of evidence she was going to be world class dogshit as it was - we’d have all been significantly more terrified. If anything we should thank her that her hubris did for her almost immediately with one huge fuck up rather than having to tolerate some mid-level fuck ups. Oh, and of course the Queen did the nation one final favour by making most of her premiership one where parliament couldn’t and didn’t do anything.

And as one final point, if Truss had tried to pull cancer treatment from the NHS it would (a) have somehow been presented as a ‘benefit’ to us, and (b) would have come with some sort of tax break for private healthcare providers.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Actually, I see a couple more states now have zero income tax.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Almost anyone else, I’d agree. But the quote also points out Truss shouting at her staff when they told her that the money wasn’t there that they were wrong, she knew it was there, and they had to find it.

That makes me think she would have done this, and worse, because she was absolutely unhinged. Also, I think her bizarre behaviour since being booted out is evidence that everything pre-PM was a case of eye-watering ineptitude being masked by a combination of competent underlings and civil servants mitigating the damage and the distraction of Johnson wobbling his way to his own doom. If we’d have seen more of the true Truss before she became PM - and there was already a lot of evidence she was going to be world class dogshit as it was - we’d have all been significantly more terrified. If anything we should thank her that her hubris did for her almost immediately with one huge fuck up rather than having to tolerate some mid-level fuck ups. Oh, and of course the Queen did the nation one final favour by making most of her premiership one where parliament couldn’t and didn’t do anything.

And as one final point, if Truss had tried to pull cancer treatment from the NHS it would (a) have somehow been presented as a ‘benefit’ to us, and (b) would have come with some sort of tax break for private healthcare providers.

No question she's unhinged, but the Tufton Street lot do have a sort of point when they point out that it wasn't just tax cuts that did for her. She committed (for far longer than needed) to spending a lot on domestic fuel support. So either she didn't care at all about fiscal conservatism or just had a vague sense of tax cuts paying for themselves.

She'd not have been allowed to get anywhere near cutting this. And if she had tried to make this level of fiscal saving, it would have been social security (non pensioner) that would have copped it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Oh, I should add that the California's tax system is way more progressive than the zero income tax states. California has other problems, especially cost of living, but its tax system is actually not bad for most people.

[Crabcakes]

She'd not have been allowed to get anywhere near cutting this. And if she had tried to make this level of fiscal saving, it would have been social security (non pensioner) that would have copped it.

Yeah, sorry - I might not have got across what I meant. I don’t think she’d have ever been allowed to do it either, but I absolutely can see it having been something she herself could have floated rather than an example of the level of cut she would have had to make. Or at least the scenario that some poor civil servant had to present it to her as the cost of her schemes on the assumption she’d be horrified, only to have her say ‘seems reasonable’.

And then, once that idea was in her head it might be something she’d float in an interview or leak, thinking everyone would be backslapping clever Liz and her cash-saving to give them lovely, lovely tax cuts rather than looking aghast.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Or at least the scenario that some poor civil servant had to present it to her as the cost of her schemes on the assumption she’d be horrified, only to have her say ‘seems reasonable’.

Like Charles Clarke and the Turkey Twizzlers.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Tories got very lucky with Truss losing her seat.

The Liz Truss event is starting, and Tim Stanley starts by asking if Britain is heading into socialism.

Truss says we are already in socialism.

She says state spending was at 45% of GDP, equivalent to what it was in the 1970s. This was the cumulative effect of Blairite and Brownite policies, he says.

But she says the Tories are responsible too. They failed to challenge this orthodoxy.

So Tory policies too, not just Blair and Brown.

Did she actually cut any spending when she was in charge? She actually did a more generous than expected fuel bill support payment. Is she now saying she'd have slashed NHS spending and frozen pensions?