During 1906–1914, the Liberal Party, under the leadership of H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, began to use the state to provide far more public services, including health and unemployment insurance, government-financed pensions, minimum wages, and a commitment to redistributive taxation. As a result of these fiscal changes, taxes as a proportion of national product more than doubled in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and then doubled again in the first three decades of the twentieth. The tax system also became more “progressive,” so that wealthier people bore a heavier
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