NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
November 26, 2011
Downsizing issues
Did you know? "About half of Americans don't pay taxes." This Tea Party mantra is being dusted off again, now that the bipartisan Congressional super-committee has failed to find $2 trillion in "cuts" over the next decade (on a shortfall of around $16 trillion), thus activating a (rewritable) emergency backup plan that will gratuitously trash the American military in fiscal 2013.Republicans won't agree with Democrat proposals to raise taxes on "the rich" to fill much of the gap; Democrats won't discuss welfare-state entitlements; and there you go. As we've seen from Greece and Italy, now, elected politicians can't cope with "downsizing issues." They continue to flap about, emotionally and ineffectually, until the liquidators call, whereupon they're re-placed by unelected "technocrats." (Who should be called, "receivers.") So if half (actually 46 per cent of 76 million households) don't pay (income) taxes (though the state gets them many other ways), what is the problem? (Sorry for all the brackets.) And, as a Tea Partier might add, merrily, why do we need to tax the rich more? Why don't we tax the poor for a change? I don't trust statistics, even those quoted by people on my side. As I have oft argued, statistics, which may point to half-truths, or the absolutely obvious, invariably slur the fine details. And God, or the Devil, is in those details. Even when the number-crunching is accurate, and context has been honestly provided, we are dealing with averages. When you have one foot in the oven, and the other in the deep freeze, the space between your legs might be a nice average. As I have also argued, remorselessly, the background is central government trying to micro-manage both economy and society from a distance so yawning, that it depends entirely upon statistics. These generate innumerable fake problems to replace the real ones; and are in turn exploited by state-spawned vested interests: cancerous entities that "sell a problem" in order to line their own pockets with the money governments have borrowed and taxed. Politicians - and the more "progressive," the worse they get - work on plausibility, not truth. Statistics are the factories in which plausibilities are forged, and given the scale of our war on nature - the vast martial demands for "social engineering" to create statistical "equalities" that nature does not care for - politicians can hardly have enough of them. They load statistics in their guns every day and fire them off. The leading politicians are our generals on this battlefield. But nature is still winning the war, and the vast machinery of statistical government is disintegrating before our eyes. (If an army got to elect its generals, of course it would lose the war. That's why the democratic Athenians were creamed by the oligarchic Spartans.) So: to the question for the hour. What is the correct balance between budget cuts and new taxes that will repair the government machine? That is the question every superficially reasonable pundit is asking, and answering in his own way. And my way, if you've read this far, is to say it is an incredibly stupid question. Yes, I'm vaguely on the side of the Tea Party, or its equivalent in any other western jurisdiction; but as I've come to realize, I'm considerably more redneck than they are. The biggest mistake Ronald Reagan made was to negotiate "modest" tax increases in return for "big" cuts with the Democrat-controlled Congress in 1983. Congress took the extra revenue and ran with it. Meanwhile they welshed ("scotched" if you prefer) on the cuts they'd agreed to. Result: the even bigger gap between revenue and expenditure that Democrats then marketed as the "Reagan deficit." It has been the same story wherever this sort of agreement is negotiated; Italy most recently. Taxes are the air politicians breathe. Under insuperable pressure they will agree to a few cosmetic cuts a little further down the road, in exchange for higher taxes now. That's exactly what the Italian Parliament did under the last gasp of Silvio Berlusconi. He being no Reagan, incidentally. For sake of argument, a progressive type will ask, theatrically: "Will you agree to just 10 cents of tax hike in exchange for a dollar of budget cuts?" And when you reply, "First show me your dollar," he then turns to the gallery to announce that you are a fanatic. What the Tea Partiers know - like our Canadian "Beaver Tooth Alliance," once I get it started - is that the dime is for real, and the dollar is "for the sake of argument" only. Now there's some truth for you. And by the way, even though 46 per cent of American households are zero-rated for income tax, the very existence of the income tax system gives their government not only the right, but the means, to pry into their private lives. Freedom ain't just about money. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top