British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's plan to hike taxes to fund social care has provoked fury among many of his own lawmakers, who fear that such a clear violation of his election promises shows he is happy to oversee a sweeping expansion of the state.
After the fiscal splurge on the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson is now addressing Britain's creaking social care system, whose costs will soar as the population ages, while facing numerous other thorny policy matters.
"The proposal will be aimed at supporting the more affluent, but the tax will be paid by lower income earners. That's unfair," one Conservative lawmaker, who declined to be named, told Reuters.Like many other Western leaders, Johnson is facing demands to spend more on welfare after government borrowing ballooned to 14.2% of economic output - a level last seen at the end of World War Two.
British ministers are still thrashing out the details but Johnson had been expected to announce a roughly 1 percentage point increase on the rate of NI paid by workers and their employers, which official estimates show would raise around 10 billion pounds a year. House of Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg on Sunday invoked former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who came to regret saying "Read my lips: no new taxes" during the 1988 election campaign.
Owing to a statistical quirk during the pandemic, the official measure of earnings is running at almost 9% - which would result in a bumper payout to pensioners just as the government has stressed the need to tighten belts.
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