US President Joe Biden has produced another diplomatic gaffe, openly criticizing Prime Minister Liz Truss for her tax-cutting efforts.
Biden, 79, made the gaffe at one of his trademark ice-cream-slurping photo opportunities in Delaware, after being questioned about Prime Minister Truss’s present political challenges.
The newly-minted British prime minister tried to lower the top income tax rate on earnings over £150,000 from 45% to 40% — where it had been since 1989 until the the last month of the previous Labour government in 2010 — but was forced to backtrack after a coordinated campaign by financial institutions, the main stream media, the political left, conservatives-in-name-only in her own party, and forces inside of “the market” hostile to so-called “unfunded” tax reductions.
She was also compelled to fire her minister of finance, Kwasi Kwarteng, and replace him with Jeremy Hunt, a pro government lockdown authoritarian with ties to China who was decisively defeated in a 2019 leadership election by ordinary Conservative Group members.
Given Britain’s importance as a NATO partner, Biden would have been expected to keep a diplomatic silence on Truss’s domestic troubles, but instead opted to mock and patronize the British prime minister.
“Well, it’s foreseeable,” he sneered, ice cream in hand, twisting the knife slightly incoherently and adding: “I mean, it was… It wasn’t only me who believed it was a mistake.”
The elderly Dem continued, unsatisfied with his already outlandish outburst.
“I think that, um, the notion of slashing taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when… well, I just believe that, I, I, I disagree with the idea,” said Biden, whose net worth is reported to be approximately $8 million. He appears to have lost his line of thought.
While Britain’s leftist Labour Movement gleefully seized on Biden’s comments, adding weight to the perceived notion that they represented a partisan intervention in an allied nation’s internal matters, others in Britain, including those who are not essentially advocates of the Truss tax plan, think the President overstepped his boundaries.
“I don’t care about your politics. This is a completely unacceptable intrusion in another country’s domestic affairs,” said Tim Shipman, The Sunday Times’ top political critic.
