Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren of the Cato Institute have a very controversial but interesting article on the national budget in NRO. They argue that under the Bush Administration conservatives are getting the shaft while big-government liberals are really winning the day.
The passage of President Bush’s ten-year, $350 billion tax cut has put a bounce in the step of conservatives while casting a pall of gloom upon their liberal brethren. Yet it’s unclear to us exactly why devotees of limited government are cheering while advocates of activist government are booing. Our view of the facts suggests that both the Left and the Right are reading off the wrong political scripts. The Left should be popping the champagne bottles and the Right should be wondering how they ended up being taken to the cleaners.
Taylor and VanDoren make the argument that tax cuts are being used as a "symbolic surrogate" for what is really needed – reducing the increasingly high levels of federal spending. They also demolish the argument that tax cuts are a way of starving the government of revenue:
Machiavellian conservatives usually fall back when pressed on this to what we’ll call "The Milton Friedman Hypothesis." That is, the only way to restrain the growth of government in the long run is to starve it of revenues. This is certainly a plausible argument at first glance, but where’s the beef? Government this year will be about $400 billion in the red but spending will increase nonetheless by at least 7.4 percent. Republicans control the House, Senate, and presidency and we’re in a non-election year. If political planets aren’t properly aligned now for an attack on government spending, then when will they ever be?
Moreover, the Friedman Hypothesis is testable. If one runs a regression analysis and controls for the business cycle, no relationship can be found between the growth of federal spending and the size of the federal deficit since World War II. It might well have held in earlier days, but the public’s tolerance for debt over the past six decades demonstrates that, if deficits are a restraining factor on politicians, we’re a long way from crossing that threshold of red ink.
Conservatives may well be right to argue that the Bush tax cut will enhance long-term economic efficiency by reducing the double taxation of dividends and reducing the marginal income tax rate applied to high wage earners, but such reforms do not require deficit spending. Whether the modest gains in economic efficiency will offset the long-term damage done by exploding deficits and new distortions introduced to the tax code is anyone’s guess.
Taylor and VanDoren have a point here. The idea that the Bush Administration wants to use tax cuts to starve the government of revenue doesn’t work. First, the idea itself doesn’t work. Second, if that were true it would be politically stupid – the short term effects of such a plan would be devastating.
If anything, the Bush Adminstration’s stategy seems to be to please as many people for as much time as possible. Unfortunately, that strategy can’t last forever. Bush as the public trust on the war on terrorism, and narrowly has the public on his corner economically, but he’s not yet made the difficult decisions that will need to be made.
Bush must cut spending. It’s as simple as that. You can’t have a $400 billion deficit and raise the level of federal spending well beyond the rate of inflation. That’s exactly what a liberal would do, and it just doesn’t work.
Bush needs to go back to his original campaign promises – which means getting Social Security reform back on the table. He needs to push for real Medicare reform, not more entitlement spending that’s guaranteed to add at least another $100 billion to the deficit. He needs to push for real and substantive tort reform. He must hold every single federal agency to a rate of funding no more than the rate of inflation until the budget is balanced.
None of those decisions will be easy, but they are all necessary. The only way in which the budget can be brought to a manageable level is by controlling spending. Tax cuts will help rebuild the economy, but they only fix one aspect of the problem. As Taylor and VanDoren note:
Liberals should revel in this little-noticed turn of events. If deficits no longer matter and fights over the size of government are off the table, how bad can things be? Conservatives who care about limited government, on the other hand, should despair over developments within the Republican party and the conservative movement as a whole. As long as fiscal conservatism is defined as taking a "no new tax" pledge as opposed to a "no new spending" pledge, the limited government crowd will find themselves increasingly irrelevant to American politics.
This is just a Jumbo-sized straw-man. Maybe the reason liberals aren’t breaking out the champagne is because we don’t, after all, really want big government? Maybe we’d just like the government it takes to make sure that people have jobs and a place to live?
After all it’s not a liberal president inventing new branches and curtailing our freedoms.
Exactly how to you intend to give everyone a job and a place to live without massive government?
Moreover, where in the Constitution does it say that people have the right to a job and a place to live?
Even better, can you name a single place where such a thing has been tried which hasn’t collapsed, become tyrannical, or simply given up on trying to meet unlimited wants with limited resources?
Agencies are entirely different from branches of government. And personally, looking at recent history, I’d say the last Administration has done a far better job of curtailing my freedom than the current one. Unless you’ve forgotten who came up with no-knock warrants, the DMCA, and tried to pass the CDA which would have censored speech on the Internet?
Exactly how to you intend to give everyone a job and a place to live without massive government?
Simple, effective, fair, and minimal regulation on a free market. I don’t want to give them jobs and houses, I want everyone to have an equal chance of earning them. The free market by itself does not provide that.
Moreover, where in the Constitution does it say that people have the right to a job and a place to live?
The Ninth Amendment specifically invalidates that kind of reasoning. It doesn’t have to be in the Bill Of Rights for it to be a right.
And the right to work is recognized as a basic human right by almost every rights organization, and a majority of state constitutions. Plus there’s that whole thing about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You can hardly have an inalienable right to life if you don’t have a right to the things you need to live.
Unless you’ve forgotten who came up with no-knock warrants, the DMCA, and tried to pass the CDA which would have censored speech on the Internet?
Hey, just as many Democrats are in the pockets of big business as anybody else. If you think I openly approve of every action of the Democratic party you’re quite mistaken.
It’s pretty obvious that the only way you know how to argue with a liberal is by arguing against positions that they don’t hold. Is this what they teach you in College Republicans?
The Constitution is not based on the idea of giving people rights. You do not have a right of speech under the Constitution.
You’re right of speech is innate to your human nature, and Congress shall make no law infringing upon it.
That’s why the Constitution of the United States works – not because your rights are given to you by the government, but because you have rights which the government has no authority to take away.
The problem with your interpretation of the Constitution is that it would require it to give you rights – and to do so take rights away from someone else. There are only so many jobs in this country, and you can’t guarantee full employment as much as you would try. (And believe me, the Keynesians tried over and over again and only made things worse.) You can’t guarantee people housing because that housing requires the work of other people.
The entire idea of economic redistribution does not and has never worked. You don’t have the right to take from me, nor do I have the right to take from you. Yet the concept of "economic redistributive justice" requires the government to get in the business of taking from someone to give to another.
When the government has guns and the ability to take whatever it wants in the name of "fairness" democracy cannot survive. Look at every single effort to institute such a system. Each and every time the results have been the same, economic collapse at the best, totalitarianism and genocide at the worst.
I don’t care how noble an idea may be in theory, what I care about are results. And the idea that government is more just than the free market, and that we should divide this nation into the haves and the have nots and give from one to the other is a recipe for social disaster.
No, that’s what I’ve learned after years of reading political philosophy, history, and actually trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I may not know how to create the perfect government (and as a conservative I’m not even willing to try) but I can tell you what doesn’t work, and economic redistribution is one of the things that most certainly does not.
The Constitution is not based on the idea of giving people rights.
Then why did you ask me where the Constitution grants a certain right? If it doesn’t grant rights, why did you bring it up?
You weren’t trying to be duplicitous, were you?
The problem with your interpretation of the Constitution is that it would require it to give you rights – and to do so take rights away from someone else.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You brought up the Constitution, not me.
There are only so many jobs in this country, and you can’t guarantee full employment as much as you would try.
People have a basic right not to be homeless and starving. It’s part of the “right to life”. Making sure they’re enough jobs for people seems to be the fairest way to do that. Otherwise we have to just give them the food, and you can’t support that, can you?
You’re between a rock and a hard place, I guess. You’re surprisingly candid in admitting the free market can’t provide for everybody, but you won’t just give away entitlements. I guess folks are just supposed to starve to death? Is this the “compassionate conservativism” people talk about?
I can tell you what doesn’t work, and economic redistribution is one of the things that most certainly does not.
Sure. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how the rich receive benefits from a level of public access that the poor simply don’t have – personal access to lawmakers, guaranteed political franchise, attention by the police to their concerns, even better housing and food. Is it really unreasonable to ask them to pay more in the light of how much more they get from our society and government?
That’s not redistribution, that’s the rich footing the bill for the public infrastructures that they use more than the poor. Sounds fair to me.
Again, the rich get better housing and food because they’ve earned it. As for your other comments, here’s what I wrote previously that shows how fallacious that argument is:
I hate that people keep trotting out this argument as it’s patently stupid.
Last time I checked, I don’t see many millionaires standing in line at the welfare office. I don’t see many millionaires on food stamps. If fairness is defined by who uses pays, then the poor should be paying more taxes than the rich.
What about property rights then? Again, the argument that the rich get more out of the system doesn’t hold water. Yes, they have more property, but if you have a million dollars the utility is such laws are less in all but the most extreme of circumstances.
Let’s say Donald Trump and myself both have our TV sets stolen. Let’s say that for some reason I have the same 42′ plasma screen picture-in-picture TV as he does. (If only that were true!)
The utility of property rights is greater in my case because that $4,000 TV represents a much greater share of my total wealth – so that if I lose it, I’m screwed, while all Donald Trump has to do is pick the change in his Corinthian leather sofa and get a new one.
In other words, the utility of property rights is greater in my case because I have a smaller income.
So, if you’re going to make the argument that the people who get the most utility from the system pay the most, then the rich should be paying far less. Granted, that’s not a fair system, but that is also the consequences of trying to make such a fundamentally flawed argument.
What your argument boils down to is a justification for economic redistribution. The rich didn’t get their money by stealing from the poor, they got it by working hard, investing well, and creating new wealth for everyone. A society that punishes success, creativity, and initiative is a society that is doomed to fail.
A society that punishes success, creativity, and initiative is a society that is doomed to fail.
The rich sure are getting horribly punished, after all. We need to give em a break. Thier suffering is incredible.
Last time I checked, I don’t see many millionaires standing in line at the welfare office. I don’t see many millionaires on food stamps. If fairness is defined by who uses pays, then the poor should be paying more taxes than the rich.
The wealthy indirectly benefit just as much as those who need them directly benefit from our social services. This is obvious enough, it shouldn’t have to be explained.
The wealthy need to quit thier bitching already. (Although I wonder how many really are complaining and if overly whinny punditry is more to blame for our supposed overtaxed wealthy problem.) Tax breaks need to go almost exclusively to those whose livlihoods might actually be improved by the extra cash. At least until we can afford otherwise, which is definetly not now.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me…
The problem is that the really wealthy can afford higher taxes. People who are have high earnings but aren’t rich yet (the small business owners that employ half of all this countries workers) are the ones who get screwed. It’s easy to say "soak the rich" until you realize that the person who gives you your job is one of the "rich" and they’ve just gotten soaked so much they can’t afford to hire you.
If fairness is defined by who uses pays, then the poor should be paying more taxes than the rich.
Ah, but welfare and food stamps aren’t the only benefit one can get from the government.
After all, Donald Trump can talk to the President, or any elected official, practically any time he wants. I challenge you to find the same level of access. Millionaires never have to worry about getting the police concerned about something that happens to them.
If you don’t think that people with power pay attention to the people with money, you live in a world of trusting naivete. Why isn’t it reasonable to ask the rich to pay for the greater attention the government pays to their concerns?
The rich didn’t get their money by stealing from the poor
Except, of course, where they did.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me…
Sigh. C’mon Jay, think about it. Those unemployment checks and food stamps you were complaining about keep a lot of people off the streets, and many who otherwise would be, if on the streets, out of crime.
That’s just one small example. I’m sure you could come up with more.
People who are have high earnings but aren’t rich yet (the small business owners that employ half of all this countries workers) are the ones who get screwed.
I never said our tax code was perfect (In fact very very far from.) and doesn’t need some serious adjustments.
So crime only happens to the rich? Last time I checked, you’re more likely to be shot/mugged/raped in a poor section of town than a rich one.
At the end of the day the whole argument boils down to "liberals think its okay to take from one group and give to another". The argument that the rich get more from life can easily be taken to its logical extreme. Since rich people can take longer vacations they can get more sunshine. Therefore the poor should have the right to lock the rich in windowless rooms to make things more fair.
When you start thinking in those terms you have to start eroding the concept of individual rights. You have to argue that membership in some group, be it the "rich" or the "poor" entitles you to special rights or special burdens. Such logic seems to care little whether that poor person is poor because he drank away his life or that rich person is rich because he was smart and employed thousands of people who would have been jobless without his enterprise.
The whole idea of economic redistribution is that the one group should have fewer rights than another based on the economic status. Once that sort of logic influences policy than the whole idea of "equal justice under law" dies.
Life isn’t fair and using government to try to make life fair is a recipe for disaster. There will always be people who can do something better – that doesn’t mean I should get to hobble someone who runs faster than I or be able to blind someone who sees better.
For all the supposed compassion behind liberalism, there’s nothing particularly brave or compassionate about saying that you would do good with someone else’s money. If you want to see the government get more money, you’re welcome to send yours. If you want to do something for the poor, volunteer in a soup kitchen, give blood, mentor a kid. Raising someone else’s taxes is just a placebo.
Life isn’t fair
You’re the one who wants everyone taxed equally. Well life isn’t fair Jay!
Anyway, two questions:
1) What is your ideal method of taxation since ours is so unacceptable?
2) On the subject of wealth redistribution: Did recieve any federal student aid to go to Gustavus?
So crime only happens to the rich? Last time I checked, you’re more likely to be shot/mugged/raped in a poor section of town than a rich one.
Why, yes! And why might that be? Could it be because the rich enjoy a level of protection from the police that poor do not?
So why not ask the rich to pay for the privilege?
The whole idea of economic redistribution is that the one group should have fewer rights than another based on the economic status.
Wrong again. And, btw, the phrase you’re looking for is “progressive taxation”, not economic redistribution. The whole idea is that certain people enjoy far more rights as a result of their economic status, and that therefore they should bear a greater portion of the bill for those rights.
Don’t get me wrong. The rich earned their wealth. But guess what? They earned it with the help of the public. Its only fair, then, to ask them to pay the public its share of their success.
1. I don’t mind a moderately progressive tax system, purely for utilitarian reasons. I believe that taxes that hamper economic investment need to be lowered. At this point, I think that the current priority needs to be on spending cuts rather than tax cuts. Our current tax policy is fairly good now that the marriage penalty and the death tax have been eliminated. There may be wiggle room for some cuts in taxes that effect small business, but those should be secondary to reducing wasteful federal spending. However, I’m not against a flat tax system either, especially one that closes the loopholes that allow many people to avoid paying taxes at all. I think that if we did institute a flat tax, you’d see revenues increase dramatically without sacrifice economic growth.
2. I see where you’re going with this…
Yes, I did use some federal loans, including subsidized loans to pay for my education. Again, I look at the Stafford and Perkins loads programs as a pretty decent utilitarian deal. The cost/benefit ratio for these programs makes them acceptable.
I would have far fewer objections to "progressive" taxation if the federal government did a better job of making sure that money went where it was needed, rather than in the hands of unscruptulous businessmen and contractors.
But all federal spending falls under Friedman’s Fourth Rule of Spending: that when you spend someone else’s money on someone else you neither care how much is spend or what it’s being spent on. The federal goverment’s budgeting system is the most arcane and bizarre system of accounting on the planet. It makes Enron and WorldCom look like model citizens by comparison. (Allan Schick of The Brookings Institution has a very good textbook on the budget process. It’s dense as hell, but also indispensible.)
When you have a system with that lack of accountability, you have to watch it like a hawk. Yet the government spends with little regard for the fact that they’re spending our money. This isn’t fair to us, nor is it fair to the people who have become on government programs that routinely defraud and abuse them.
I don’t have a problem with a basic social safety net, but I require accountability and a system that doesn’t foster dependency on government. I do have a problem with an out-of-control bureaucracy, rampant fiscal irresponsibility, and a system that makes entire classes of people virtual slaves to the federal government. That simply isn’t healthy for society, and raising taxes only makes all of that worse.
First, the reason has nothing to do with police protection – but because low-income areas tend to have more criminals in it. Cops tend to be found where the crime is, which is why you’re more likely to see a police cruiser in a poor part of town than a rich one.
Secondly, police are a local service, not a federal one. You pay for police via local taxes, not your federal income tax. (If anything federal mandates are an annoyance for local police officers – hence cases like Printz v. US and others…)
Cops tend to be found where the crime is, which is why you’re more likely to see a police cruiser in a poor part of town than a rich one.
Unless a crime is suspected of happening. I dare you to go into a rich part of your city and call in a burglary and time how long it takes for the police to show up. Then go to the poor part and do the same. I bet the cops are in the rich part in ten minutes. I bet that they don’t show up to the poor part for two hours.
Secondly, police are a local service, not a federal one. You pay for police via local taxes, not your federal income tax.
Straw man. I’ve never argued that progressive taxation should only apply to federal taxes. To the contrary. But of course, if police are funded locally, then you have a situation where the best-funded police are in the areas with the least crime, and in the highest crime areas, the police struggle for cash. Clearly we need a fairer system.
So, are you ever going to actually address my arguments instead of raising straw men to knock down? This is getting kind of old.
No matter how many accusations of "straw man" you use, it doesn’t undercut the logic of my argument.
"Progressive taxation" is nothing more than a euphemism for economic redistribution. They both involve taking from one group and giving it to another.
Once you establish economic redistribution as being a moral directive rather than something based in utility, you have to infringe upon the rights of one group in favor of another. You have to make the argument that the rich have less of a right to their own property than do others. Even if you accept that the rich should give of their wealth that still does not justify the state forcing people to do so. Now, I’ll make a concession to a moderately progressive tax system as a matter of utility, but this idea that tax cuts are some kind of de facto moral wrong is just an argument from arrogance. Just because you don’t like rich people does not give you the right to infringe upon their rights.
If we accept that society has the right to punish people who have the ability to get more enjoyment out of life or even get more utility out of government, why not raise taxes on anyone with an IQ greater than 120? After all, they’re smarter than most, so they have better access to their representatives. Why not tax people who have 20/20 eyesight since they can see road signs better than I?
The fact remains that even if you could justify economic redistribution on that level, federal spending cannot nor has it ever done much to end poverty – if anything they’ve made it worse.
It never ceases to be entertaining when Jay talks about how every society that has tried to redistribute wealth fails, when the reality is that every civilized economy in the world today DOES redistribute wealth and the economies that don’t practice it have more than 200 years of failure on their resume.
I agree with Alex that most of “the rich” who’ve seen their top tax rate plunge by 70 percent in the last 50 years while accumulating additional wealth at a pace that vastly exceeds other income groups don’t necessarily feel “oppressed”. Jay’s relentless concern for the oppressed rich tugs on my heartstrings, but his utter apathy for everybody whose paychecks doesn’t have a certain amount of zeros to the left of the decimal point puts on a pedestal where he and his fellow “Young Republicans” stand.
As I’ve stated before, and which Jay has reinforced on several occassions sense, he fails to recognize people who don’t fall into the two top quintiles of per capita income as even being human. He attempted to pin me down as card-carrying KKK bigot when I mentioned how Hispanic field hands would be unlikely to take to the Schwarzenegger message that their plantation owner bosses deserve another tax cut and fewer regulations on labor. He fired back that not all Hispanics are field hands and that “many” are successful white-collar technology workers or business owners. Jay’s track record has proven that the Hispanics who don’t fit the suburban profile he outlined simply don’t count in his equation of the world.
Much as I hate to give the GOP advice, here’s a small nugget they may find helpful in their above-stated quest to “reach out to minority voters.” Acknowledge that most of them AREN’T wealthy businessmen and that many are in fact poor people who need at least one shred of incentive to vote for a party who either pretends they are invisible or justifies denying them a “universal tax cut” on the grounds that they’re “indolent freeloaders” for not earning in excess of $26,000 a year. At this point, acknowledging that working class people are human beings would be a tremendous step in the right direction for Jay and the Republican party, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
You have to make the argument that the rich have less of a right to their own property than do others.
Well, if you hire me to do a service for you, but then when it comes time to pay, you stiff me, don’t you have less of a right to the money that you should have paid me? I’d say so.
It’s not that the rich have less right to their money. It’s just that some portion of their money is not rightfully theirs.
If we accept that society has the right to punish people who have the ability to get more enjoyment out of life or even get more utility out of government, why not raise taxes on anyone with an IQ greater than 120?
Because, of course, it’s not punishment to be asked to pay your fair share. Just as you’re not being “punished” for not sneaking out the back door when you pay your bill at Perkins.
After all, they’re smarter than most, so they have better access to their representatives.
Oh? Who gets paid more attention by political leaders? Warren Buffet or Marilyn Vos Savant?
Now this is probably the most illuminating view into the liberal mindset I’ve yet heard. Indeed, you’ve just managed to condense liberalism into a nutshell better than anyone I’ve ever seen.
This also leads to why liberalism is so problematic and why this attitude is dangerous.
Tax revenues are the government taking from the people, that much is self-evident. Under the terms of the social contract, the people consent to taxation as a way of maintaining that contract. You give up the absolute right of property for the safety the state provides. Certainly both conservatives and liberals would agree on this part. Both today’s liberalism and conservatism stem from this classical liberal worldview.
Here’s where these philosophies diverge:
Conservatives believe that these tax revenues are the property of the people. It’s your
money. In other words, government has the obligation to do the best it can to see that you get your money’s worth. If you pay for a service out of your money you have the right to demand that service make itself accountable to you. You would certainly be mad if you found out someone was
recklessly spending money they had told you was going for a good cause.
Now, I believe you’re dead on in describing the attitude of modern-day liberals. The attitude is that tax revenues are not yours to begin with.
That attitude is dangerous, as it breeds a complacency that cuts against the very founding ideals of this country. This nation was founded because of the idea of reckless taxation without due representation. Great Britain believed that colonial tax revenues were its right as sovereign, and the colonies should be grateful for the protection and services they received from their mother country.
The problem with liberalism is that once someone accepts something as their "right" it makes it that much harder to demand accountability. It breeds a kind of institutional arrogance that inevitably leads to problems. To borrow a phrase from pop culture: "with great power comes great responsibility". When power (such as the power to tax) is taken as a right, the idea that such power has a responsibility quickly becomes lost.
As Chief Justice Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland "the power to tax is the power to destroy". Conservatives view taxes as a necessary evil in which the government has the obligation to be responsible and forthcoming. Liberals view taxes as a right of the government over the people.
Naturally, if you take the latter view, then you’ve just granted the government an extremely large amount of power – and you’ve created a worldview in which the government can easily misuse that power. It doesn’t take a student of political philosophy to see why that is simply unwise. Whenever you have someone who has both the guns and the butter, the military and the economic power, you’ve just created the perfect entrance for tyranny.
That is why it is simply irresponsible to take that attitude. Taxes are not the right of government – it is the taxpayers money. With the right to tax under the social contract comes an
equal obligation to treat that money with the utmost respect. Taxes are not a right of government, they are a privilege given to government by the people under the terms of the social contract, and the people have the right to demand accountability for where their money goes.
Taxpayer-financed government can’t survive without the people and the people can’t survive without taxpayer-financed government if a society has any hope of survival. So contrary to the growing GOP viewpoint that government should somehow be self-financed, taxes ARE the right of any government that has a prayer of working.
This also leads to why liberalism is so problematic and why this attitude is dangerous.
Not so. It’s a very moral and utilitaroan view.
After all if I run up an $8 tab at Perkins, guess what? $8 that I have is no longer rightfully mine, even if it’s still sitting in my pocket. The fact that I could slip out the back without paying still doesn’t make the $8 rightfully mine. It still belongs to Perkins.
You don’t rightfully own what you owe to somebody else. What’s hard to understand about that? I would think a conservative would have a little more respect for the ownership of property.
The attitude is that tax revenues are not yours to begin with.
No, you’re wrong again. (It’s funny that I have to keep explaining liberalism to somebody who claims to have made a study of it.)
The $8 was mine before I went into Perkins and ordered food. When I ordered and ate the food, some of my money became the rightful property of Perkins.
When rich people excersise their influence over the public government to a greater degree than the ability of others, some of their money becomes public property. At that point progressive taxation is simply about collecting on a debt.
This nation was founded because of the idea of reckless taxation without due representation.
Yes, a principle I agree with. Of course, the inverse is just as bad – greater representation without greater taxation, which is the situation the rich are usually in. The basic principle is the same – you should get the representation you pay for.
Conservatives view taxes as a necessary evil in which the government has the obligation to be responsible and forthcoming. Liberals view taxes as a right of the government over the people.
Wrong on both counts. Both sides believe that taxes are simply a matter of payment for services rendered. What amazes me is that, while you seem willing to admit that the rich exert far more influence over and enjoy greater access to the public government, you don’t believe that they should pay more. In essence you’re arguing that a group should enjoy lower prices for services based on their ability to pay more for those services. It’s like food stamps, in reverse.
and the people have the right to demand accountability for where their money goes.
Sigh… is there any end to your strawmen? Once again you’re arguing against a position I haven’t taken. I’ve never argued for government waste. Who wants waste? And I’m certain you’ve never heard me argue for entitlement spending in this thread. All I’ve simply argued is that the rich, who enjoy a greater degree of service from the government, should pay a greater degree of the costs. Not because they can, but because they implicitly agree to when they take advantage of the greater services our government offers them.
The government is not Perkins. I can choose if I want to spend $8 on a meal at Perkins. I can’t choose not to pay taxes.
Furthermore, if I order my meal at Perkins, and it comes late, the food is cold, and they try to change the bill from $8 to $10, would you say "Gee, they really screwed me, but they have a right to take my money" and walk away?
Hell no you wouldn’t, unless you’re off your rocker.
You’d demand that you only be charged for the services you paid for, and you’d be within your right to argue that you shouldn’t have to pay at all for such sloppy service.
I find the entire argument that no one can succeed in this country without the patronizing hand of government to be an exceptionally patronizing argument. It still leads to an attitude that breeds an institutional arrogance that does not fit in a democratic state. Once you except this idea of deus ex Washington D.C you forgo the spirit of individual rights this country was founded upon.
Many of the people in small business I work with every day didn’t get rich because the government made them so. They got rich because they worked their asses off to do so. It is an insult to them and to anyone who has reached a level of success in this country to insinuate that they couldn’t have done it without some group of bureaucrats in Washington.
Furthermore, what your arguing is essentially a justification for slavery. After all, the plantation owner gave their slaves a roof, food, and a job? They should just accept that regular beatings are a part of the deal and accept that they’re paying for services they use every day.
The fact remains that Americans are overtaxed on a routine basis, and just because Chet thinks that they don’t pay what he considers their "fair share" (regardless of whether that is true or not), it does not give him or anyone else the right to take that by force.