US President Joe Biden has said that UK Prime Minister Liz Truss was wrong to try to solve Britain’s economic troubles by aggressively cutting taxes. This comes amid media reports claiming that MPs from Truss’ own Conservative Party were looking for ways to remove her from office due to her economic failures.
“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Biden said on Sunday of Truss’ budget, now mostly abandoned. He was speaking to reporters at an ice-cream shop in Portland, Oregon during an unannounced campaign stop for the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor, Tina Kotek.
“I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when... anyway, I disagree with the policy,” the president said, adding that the failure of the new UK PM’s mini-budget was “predictable.”
However, Biden acknowledged that it was “up to Great Britain to make that choice, not me.”
The remarks were a rare instance of a US leader criticizing the domestic policies of one of Washington’s closest allies.
Truss and her cabinet introduced radical tax cuts to counter high inflation and soaring energy prices in the UK, which are believed to have been provoked by the economic strain caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fallout from the international sanctions imposed on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine. However, the policy caused havoc in financial markets and a sharp drop in the value of the pound, which almost reached parity with the dollar early last week.
On Friday, Truss sacked Kwasi Kwarteng, her chancellor of the Exchequer, and announced a reversal of plans to cut corporate taxes.
Contrary to what’s happening in the UK, the American economy is “strong as hell,” Biden claimed.
“I’m concerned about the rest of the world. The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries,” he said.