Can
We Afford a Tax Cut?
President
Bush’s very modest tax cut proposal is being debated with all the
passion that raged over the Emancipation Proclamation, and for the
same reason. At stake is the question whether some men have the
right to live at the expense of others.
Today
the taxing power, rather than chattel slavery, is the instrument
by which the parasitical element of the population subsists. And
that element, which includes politicians, panics at the slightest
reduction in the state’s power to plunder. Once you start liberating
taxpayers, even a little tiny bit, nobody knows where it may end.
Maybe
horrors! the income tax will be abolished. Not that Bush contemplates
such an atrocity. But the parasites, their armpits hot with sweat,
feel that he is playing with fire. He may arouse passions nobody
can control, such as "greed" defined as the desire to
keep your own money. (Wanting someone else’s money is no longer
greed, it’s "need." And the politician’s eagerness to
cater to "need," thus defined, is no longer demagogy,
but "compassion.")
The
Democrats and liberals argue against a tax cut "right now"
(as if they might favor it at some more propitious moment) on grounds
that "we can’t afford it." Since when have they turned
into thrifty bookkeepers? Usually people who say they "can’t
afford" things mean they have to reduce their spending. But
the Democrats oppose spending reductions!
They
aren’t complaining that Bush is also proposing more spending every
year, including doubling Medicare funding over the next decade.
No, that’s fine by them. In their minds, we "can’t afford"
to cut taxes, but we can afford to keep increasing federal spending.
Obviously
they really mean to say that they want to keep feeding the parasites,
but they don’t want to give the host any relief. For them this is
really a matter of principle, not thrift. Their ideology mandates
that government keep growing at all times, expanding its power over
the productive host the taxpayer and swelling the ranks of the
nonproducing parasites, who consume the taxes.
Of
course they don’t like to put it this way. They want to keep inching
toward socialism without calling themselves socialists. They want
to wage class warfare without facing the basic conflict of interests
between the two classes, the parasites and the hosts.
In
the phrase we can’t afford it, the key word is the pronoun we. The
crypto-socialist wants the two classes to believe they are one.
The host must be trained to think of himself and the parasite as
a single unit, whose interests are identical. He must be so stupefied
that he imagines that his burdens are freedoms, and that he owes
his freedoms to the state.
The
crypto-socialist loves it when taxpayers say they oppose a tax cut.
Such taxpayers represent a triumph of propaganda. They actually
think it’s in their own interest to pay high taxes! They think of
themselves and their natural enemies as we!
The
Democrat-liberal propaganda line blames deficits and the national
debt on Ronald Reagan, during whose administration federal spending
did grow explosively. But this omits a salient detail: Congress,
not the president, appropriates money. Ronald Reagan never spent
a dime that hadn’t been authorized by Congress. For all eight years
he was in office, the House was controlled by the Democrats and
for two years both houses of Congress were controlled by them. (The
Republicans had a majority in the Senate for six years.)
So
the Democrats could have cut federal spending at any time during
the Reagan years. But they talk as if they were helpless innocent
bystanders while all those trillions were being spent by the wastrel
Reagan.
In
those days both parties, for opposite reasons, built the myth of
Reagan the Budget-Slasher. The Republicans wanted the taxpayers
to think Reagan was holding the line against the parasites; the
Democrats wanted the parasites to think Reagan was "making
war on the poor" (meaning the parasites). If only Reagan had
done half the things he was accused of doing!
So
here we are, in the era of "compassionate conservatism,"
when the taxpayer may well wish that Bush would do half of what
the Democrats accuse him of trying to do. We can afford it.
March
21, 2001
Joe
Sobran is a nationally syndicated columnist. He also writes "Washington
Watch" for The
Wanderer, a weekly Catholic newspaper, and edits SOBRAN'S,
a monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.
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(c) 2001 by Griffin Internet
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