Here's a little clip from a news story about Pres. Obama not ruling out raising taxes. In a recession.
During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed "you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime." But the simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for.
"If we want an economy that's going to grow in the future, people have to understand we have to bring those deficits down. And it's going to be difficult, hard for us to do. And the path to that is through health care reform," Geithner said. "We're not at the point yet where we're going to make a judgment about what it's going to take."
At what point is China going to say "Okay U.S., we've lent you trillions of dollars, and now we want to be paid back." Our current economic model is just not sustainable and it worries me greatly. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir right now, but this spending has gotten out of hand. Raising taxes in a recession just screams bad idea all over it for me anyway. I believe in some government action and help but what we're seeing now is way more than I'd like to see.
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3 comments:
"Read my lips: no new taxes." I don't think anyone has ever kept that promise.
As Nic points out, backtracking on this common campaign promise is certainly a bipartisan phenomenon. So why are voters so gullible and easily sold when politicians make these appealing promises?
Regarding the use of tax revenues to benefit one social class at the expense of another, I'm finding that I subscribe to the Ezra T. Benson/Frederic Bastiat/William Leggett/Ron Paul school of libertarian thought. Explanation:
If A goes into B's house and takes B's money at gunpoint, regardless of all the wonderful, selfless things A promised to do with B's money, A would promptly be arrested as a thief. "But for some reason it is considered morally acceptable when government does that very thing." Bastiat called this "legal plunder" and also called the state "the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The basic idea is that governments should simply stay out of the looting business, leave people to their own pursuits, and pass general laws that protect all citizens and their property. I really like the following quote by Leggett:
"Whenever a government assumes the power of discriminating between the different classes of the community, it becomes, in effect, the arbiter of their prosperity, and exercises a power not contemplated by any intelligent people in delegating their sovereignty to their rulers. It then becomes the great regulator of the profits of every species of industry, and reduces men from a dependence on their own exertions, to a dependence on the caprices of their Government. Government possesses no delegated right to tamper with individual industry a single hair's breadth beyond what is essential to protect the rights of person and property.
In the exercise of this power of intermeddling with the private pursuits and individual occupations of the citizen, a Governmnet may at pleasure elevate one class and depress another; it may one day legislate exclusively for the farmer, the next for the mechanic, and the thid for the manufacturer, who all thus becomes the mere puppets of legislative cobbling and tinkering, instead of independent citizens, relying on their own resources for their prosperity. It assumes the functions which belong alone to an overruling Providence, and affects to become the universal dispenser of good and evil."
We see government exercising this power more and more under this administration (and the last), and like Creighton, it worries me too. As always, sorry for the long-winded comment.
Well said, sir. Reminds me of a couple more quotes, actually:
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." -- Adam Smith
"Property rights are the foundation of all rights in a free society. Without the right to own a printing press, for example, freedom of the press becomes meaningless." -- Ron Paul
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