Instead, bored by economics, Johnson chose to swan around international conferences, far more interested in what was happening to Ukrainians than to his own hard-pressed people. a more competitive, deregulated country, able to better the regulatory practices of the next-door, sclerotic European Union. Given the policy gift of “ Getting Brexit Done,” Johnson did not use his newfound policy freedom to make the U.K. Third, neither leader has used his mandate to increase productivity in his country by deregulating the economy. If the Fed and the Bank of England are complicit in reigniting inflation, Biden and Johnson have served as willing accomplices. As such, this marked increase in federal spending was bound to spur inflation. Biden, in the damning verdict of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, has fiscally poured gasoline on a roaring fire, passing “emergency” spending bills totaling trillions of dollars as the U.S. In Johnson’s case, ignoring the glorious fiscal record of Margaret Thatcher, he has championed ever-higher spending, while increasing the U.K.’s tax burden to levels not seen since the Labour governments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s. Second, compounding the first error, Biden and Johnson have chosen to increase government spending like a pair of drunken sailors. In both cases, given the banks’ independence, neither Biden nor Johnson, who remains as interim prime minister, could do much except haplessly cheerlead about their economies from the sidelines - even as everyone knows the governing establishments have ineptly driven the two economies into a ditch. With double-digit inflation likely to occur in both countries soon, the consequent cost-of-living crisis that is brewing will be the bane of people’s lives, serving as a misery tax on the lower and middle classes. First, the two governments’ central banks - the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England - have both utterly lost the plot, printing more money than they ought to, setting free the beast of inflation. The policy similarities between the United States and the United Kingdom are striking. For this structural, underlying reason, it is likely that Biden will be shown the door in two years’ time, just as Johnson was unedifyingly oust e d this past week. The problems and dangers confronting their countries are frighteningly similar. But this is to miss the dangerous commonalities between the two men regarding policy.
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