Nicola Willis and her boss have been peddling a fake short history of the previous government that runs as follows:
They spent and spent, they had nothing to show for it and that is not how you grow the economy, because You can't tax yourself to prosperity.
There is a sort of humour to be had from watching Willis inspiring her boss to flights of rhetoric. What can look easy in the hands of the carpenter can turn to splinters in your own oafish hands.
Luxon, whose entire career appears to have been carried along by a habit of pricking up his ears when someone utters a catchy phrase and making it his own, evidently liked that thing Nicola said there about taxing your way to prosperity and in his usual hapless way, tried to stuff this wisdom McNugget into the trousers of his own rhetoric.
