As Bruce Bartlett points out, the Margaret Thatcher American conservatives admire bears little resemblance to the British Prime Minister of the same name. In particular, she did hardly anything to scale down the British welfare state (although she did make a hash of retirement security — more on that in a later post). Here’s one indicator, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (pdf):

Photo

What she did do was redistribute the burden of taxation downward, cutting top income tax rates while raising consumption taxes, which fall most heavily on low incomes. Her downfall came with the poll tax, a drastically regressive tax — the same amount for everyone, regardless of income — that was too much even for her own party.

And what that means is that her truest heir in America is … Bobby Jindal, the not-so-whizzy whiz-kid governor of Louisiana, who proposed scrapping his state’s income tax and replacing it with sales taxes.

Grover Norquist loved it:

Grover Norquist, the intellectual leader of the anti-tax crowd in Washington, had praised Jindal’s plan as “the boldest, most pro-growth state tax reform in U.S. history.” He noted that it was particularly significant, because with Obama positioned to veto anything resembling the House GOP’s budget for the next several years, Louisiana might be Republicans’ best chance to show off their tax ideas on the state level. “The national media and Acela-corridor crowd continue to focus on the bickering Washington, but they can learn what real tax reform looks like by looking to Louisiana,” Norquist said.

But strange to say, it’s not just Acela riders who hate this idea; so do the citizens of Louisiana, who disapprove by 63 to 27 percent. Jindal’s own approval has collapsed, so he’s having his own poll tax moment.

Anyway, if Republicans more generally should decide to emulate the true Thatcher record, I’m sure Democrats would be delighted.