One problem with liberals in the tax debate is that they don’t realize just how little Americans actually get from the government. When the government doesn’t provide you with universal health care, a decent pension, good schools, or accessible and affordable public transportation, why should you want to pay taxes? The answer, of course, is not for Americans to pay less but for government to spend more. As Thomas Geoghegan explains here, “people are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves.”
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July 7, 2011
[...] Ezra Klein has an excellent chart, comparing the budget deals (specifically, the ratio of spending cuts to tax increases) negotiated by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Obama. Totally confirms what Frum says about how Obama is getting screwed and screwing himself (assuming, of course, that in an ideal world he’d prefer to see a different outcome—an assumption it’s getting increasingly difficult to sustain). As a side note: it’s a sad commentary on the state of the left that increasing taxes is how we count a Democratic win these days. It just confirms in the public mind that the only thing the Democrats have to offer is more taxes, as opposed to valuable government programs. For more on this, see my earlier post. [...]
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December 19, 2011
[...] only begun to blog in June of this year—here’s my first post—I can’t tell you how thrilled and honored I am by this [...]
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December 17, 2012
[...] my very first post as a blogger, I wrote the [...]
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