Trussonomics with a Pint

I decided to do some research on Farage’s tax promises I decided to do some research on Farage’s tax promises. You know, the ones that sound like they’ve been scribbled on a beer mat between rounds – raise the personal allowance to £20,000, slash corporation tax, scrap inheritance tax, and somehow pay for it all by “cutting waste.” It’s the same old populist bait-and-switch: handouts for the wealthy disguised as help for the working class.

The numbers, once you look at them, are laughable. Raising the income-tax threshold to £20,000 alone costs £50–80 billion a year. Add inheritance-tax abolition, corporation-tax cuts, and his shiny new “Britannia card” for the super-rich, and you’re over £100 billion down before the kettle’s boiled. The supposed savings from “waste” and “civil-service fat” don’t even cover stationery.

Strip away the pub banter and what’s left is Trussonomics with a pint in its hand. Farage is promising exactly what Liz Truss tried in 2022 – massive unfunded tax cuts in the name of growth. We all remember how that went: gilt yields exploded, the pound fell through the floor, and the Bank of England had to ride to the rescue while mortgage holders paid the price.

And look who’s backing Reform. It’s not the bloke on £25k trying to heat his house – it’s hedge-fund managers, property speculators, oil investors and the deregulation junkies who cheered Truss’s mini-budget right up to the moment it imploded. They bankroll Farage because he’s their kind of “anti-establishment” hero – the sort who rails against elites while writing their tax cuts.

So I asked ChatGPT to run the numbers properly – to model who would benefit, who would pay, and what happens when the bond markets inevitably react. The result was brutal. Then I had it chart the outcome for both Truss’s budget and Farage’s plan, side by side.

Now, yes – someone earning £20,000 would gain about £1,500 a year from the tax cut. But that’s the mirage. Once you factor in higher borrowing costs, reduced services, and market jitters, that £1,500 evaporates faster than a pint in July. The bond market doesn’t care about patriotism; it cares about arithmetic. A government trying to borrow tens of billions without a plan gets punished – and the punishment arrives in the form of higher mortgages, rents, and inflation.

So who gains? The same crowd who always do – the landlords, donors, and hedge-fund gamblers who thrive on volatility. Who pays? Everyone else. Taxpayers who pick up the tab, homeowners facing higher repayments, and pensioners watching services stripped bare.

It’s the oldest con in British politics: promise the working man relief while quietly wiring the proceeds to the already wealthy. Farage calls it “common sense economics.” In reality, it’s the ghost of Truss, wrapped in the Union Flag and holding a pint – another reheated fantasy for people who mistake nostalgia for competence.

The bond market won’t salute it. It’ll just price it. And when it does, Britain will pay again – because arithmetic, unlike populism, doesn’t lie.