Against a darkening international environment, where the structural advantages and market liberalisations of the post-war decades are being rolled back, peddling the same old snake oil of a tax cut here or there just won’t wash.
Ministers need to drive up public-sector productivity via something-for-something pay deals, and support a supply-side revolution through non-inflationary tax cuts.
She insists that fiscal responsibility will take priority, but if Labour take power the pressure on her to raise more taxes will be immense.
The Speaker and the leader of the Scots Nats both rebuked Sunak for giving irrelevant and frivolous non-answers.
Hers is a flimsy proposition that Team Rishi could easily defeat, if only they had something substantial to put in its stead.
The Cassandras of Washington D.C are pointing their fingers at Hunt and Bailey’s “tighter fiscal and monetary policies”. But they were no fans of Trussonomics, either.
Turning complaints about headline figures into a detailed programme to bring them down would teach us a lot about whoever tried it.
As Robert Kennedy put it in 1968: ‘it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’.
The moral of this story is that these models provide interesting context – a little like horoscopes. But when it comes to decision-making, give me an economic historian in preference to a model any day.
‘Trussonomics’, which was never really defined and was yet to evolve, is now dead. The events in recent weeks that led to its downfall were avoidable.
The biggest loser from today’s statement is Rishi Sunak, if the new Chancellor can prove that the markets will approve of Sunak measures without the man himself.
The market reaction to the mini-Budget raises questions over whether the Opposition could fund their own prospectus without a financial panic.
A spirited defence of cutting taxes is a welcome change from a Conservative Prime Minister.
Ministers really seem to have thought they could simply spend their way to high wages and stronger productivity.
Muhammad’s mercantile savvy showed up in a host of other pro-business provisions. The most consequential one was price deregulation, which helped launch Muslims on a dynamic economic trajectory, as it did Jews and Christians who copied them.