This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's in London for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He writes political economics.

However, we're both observing the tax plan for the dominant labor government in parliament.

Rachel Reeves is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The tax plan is everything, and now it includes the dead.

They're going to tax pensions, which, as you know, can continue after death to your spouse.

So taxing the living, taxing the dead, it is a tradition, I learned, from studying Parliament's debates on taxes

in the past. You were to recall there was a bad moment in the 18th century when taxes caused

their ripple in the world, including the American Revolution. Well, here Joseph explains taxes in the

21st century and how the British government doesn't quite get the balance yet.

Here's Joe. More of this tonight.

Well, I think that high taxes are characteristic of European economies everywhere.

I think that one of the issues in the UK is that they have tried to operate

a European-style welfare state, which is very generous, while also trying to impose an American-style

level of taxation because they wanted to encourage entrepreneurship and the financial markets

here in the city of London, the financial

district. And they're now discovering that those two goals are not compatible. And they're also

discovering that if you try to increase taxes to a continental European level, it has a dramatic

negative effect on economic growth, and you end up getting continental European level rates of growth,

which is not something that they want to import over here. So I think that there's a real

dilemma where the public has not yet really internalized the fact that you have to make some choices.