With the inevitable 2010 election looking like a likely win for the Tories, what will the conservative plan for prosperity be? The Times says “he [Cameron] needs a crystal clear message about how a Conservative government will spread opportunity and benefit ordinary working-class voters." Some of these measures include cutting employers’ national insurance in order to reduce unemployment as well as introducing a Swedish-influenced market system to the educational sector.
Cutting taxes for employers will allow them to hire more workers, lowering unemployment while passing some of the savings on to the employees through reduced taxes out of their payroll. As for the market-based education system, this has been long in the works of conservative thought.
Britain’s system of state run education has been missing the bar because it is far too centralized to meet the needs of every family and unfortunately, the poorest families are suffering the most. Giving low-income families, and the rest of the population included, the option to choose schools for their children will not increase taxes to provide better education, it will only increase fairness to the system and induce more schools to advance their programs if they hope to obtain students (and therefore more government tuition). If markets can teach us (and hopefully politicians) one thing, it is that people respond to incentives. But more importantly, that it does not matter whether those people are corporate executives or school administrators.
(To view some Adam Smith Institute reports on education, click here).
