Monday, April 8, 2013

Socialist Legacy of Margaret Thatcher

The late Margaret Thatcher like Ronald Reagan would be unelectable in the primary of today's Republican Party, as Think Progress pointed out. Even she realized that capitalism could not solve  particular issues such as climate change.
She supported socialized medicine. The modern-day GOP is so obsessed with trying to repeal Obamacare that they’ve held nearly 40 votes to do so. But Obamacare is actually a much more conservative health care policy than the socialized National Health Service, which Thatcher lauded as an accomplishment of the United Kingdom. “I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud,” she wrote in her book, “It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.”
She increased taxes. Spending actually rose during Thatcher’s first seven years in office, as the New York Times reports, and taxes took up a larger percentage as share of gross domestic product. Indeed, even by the end of her time in office taxes were still a higher percentage of GDP than they were when she arrived:

Thatcher also increased the Value Added Tax (VAT), which Newt Gingrich described as “European socialism” during the 2012 election cycle.
She believed in climate change. Thatcher was an early adherent to climate science, and once warned, “The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.” [Think Progress 3/8/13]

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