While many conservatives remember former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as someone who furthered their cause, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell argues that Thatcher was a “good socialist” who had nothing to do with the Soviet Union’s collapse.
“Today’s fond Republican memories of Margaret Thatcher were as much mythology as reality,” O’Donnell said on “The Last Word” Monday evening. “Republicans falsely credit Reagan and Thatcher with bringing down the Soviet Union when they did no such thing. The Soviet Union collapsed from within. To believe that the Soviet Union would be thriving today were it not for Reagan and Thatcher is to believe that communism is a good idea, that communism works. In fact, imperialistic dictatorial communism collapsed of its own horrible weight.”
“It simply could not survive in a modern world where the dynamism of capitalism and freedom is necessary in every economy, as is, by the way, some socialism, as Margaret Thatcher well understood,” he continued. “It is not as if no one knew that the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Well, it’s actually as if only one person knew. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted in 1979 that the Soviet Union would collapse. The Soviet Union’s horribly run economy couldn’t possibly provide for the people of the many different countries who were thrown together against their will under the thinly-stretched banner of the imperialistic Soviet Union.”
O’Donnell then went on to explain that while Thatcher is typically remembered as a tax cutter, Britons still paid more in taxes than American under President Barack Obama.
“Of course, Sarah Palin’s handlers did not tell her about any of this before they wrote a statement for her praising Margaret Thatcher, and posted it on Facebook,” O’Donnell said. “She was at least a tax cutter, I’ll say that for Margaret Thatcher, but not the kind of tax cutter a Republican in this country could ever vote for. She cut the top income tax rate bracket from 83 percent to 60 percent. You see, British conservatives like Thatcher are way to the left of American liberals. There is no American liberal who would advocate a 60 percent top income tax rate. In her last year, she did manage to get the top income tax rate down to 40 percent, only in her last year, which is still higher than Barack Obama’s top income tax rate of 39.6 percent.”
“And yeah, those two tax rates are close, but hey, higher is higher, and all the Margaret Thatcher worshippers out there tonight wouldn’t be screaming — squirming right now if they had the lower tax rate, if the Thatcher tax rate didn’t end at a spot above the Obama top tax rate and the Clinton top tax rate,” he added.
“But she didn’t do that. She didn’t get the tax rates lower because she wasn’t conservative enough. I repeat, get this, British conservatives aren’t as conservative as American conservatives, and British conservatives are more liberal than American liberals. Margaret Thatcher left office with the lowest bracket, the lowest income tax bracket, at 25 percent, where today’s Republicans want the highest income tax bracket to be. She also doubled the British sales tax, the value added tax. She doubled it to 15 percent, a tax that dramatically increases the costs of everything you buy in that country.”
(h/t Mediaite)