United Liberty
Spending cuts, not tax increases are how to bring back fiscal sanity
Mon, 09/20/2010 - 1:22pm | posted by Jason Pye
Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie is hitting back at critics of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush, many of whom say that the country can’t afford to extend them, and asks why they aren’t attacking the spending increases passed under Bush:
This talk about whether tax cuts are irresponsible given the fiscal pickle we’re in is nothing more than a way of diverting attention from what Milton Friedman identified years ago as the true cost of government: how much the government shells out in a given year. We’re on the hook for it, either through higher taxes now or higher taxes later.
We’re in a lousy economy and most folks would agree that it’s not a great idea to hike taxes or create huge new entitlements and regulations that will take years to figure out. That sort of action creates exactly the sort of uncertainty that freezes people. So do desperate attempts to keep house prices from falling, zombified banks and car companies from going belly up, etc.
The one thing the federal government could conceivably do is bring some commitment to freezing or rolling back spending and intervention to some baseline. The first rule when you find yourself in a deep hole? Bitch and moan that it’s the other guy’s fault. The second rule? Stop digging.
[…]
But this much is certain: To talk about how “tax cuts” inexorably add to deficits ignores the amount of tribute that poured into D.C. throughout most of the ’00s. It’s a fundamentally faulty and fruitless discussion.
Bush was not a limited government conservative. Indeed, he spent on par with Lyndon B. Johnson.The failure of Bush was to not use his veto pen in the first six years that Republicans had control of Congress during his presidency.
This debate is not about balancing the budget or reducing budget deficits, this is about class warfare, plain and simple. Democrats do not believe that the money you earn belongs to you, it belongs to the government and, according to them, they have the right to do whatever they want.
This is not how you bring back fiscal stability, it’s how you kill the spirit of entrepreneurship that we were built upon.
