Stoking the Beast....Cutting Taxes Doesn't Shrink Gov't

[Trouser Trout]

Great article in this month's The Atlantic Monthly.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606/tax-cuts

[LSK]

1. thanks for the link

[dcfirefighter]

2. This issue, more than most, brings voters from the 'other side'.

Most republican voters with relatively comfortable lives are incredibly irritated that the GOP can't control spending.

[gristy]

3. Yes, I saw that in my hardcopy today!

Very well written. Niskanen actually had data (facts! not feelings!) to support his position.

[crickets]

4. Excellent article

Thank you for posting this. I don't have a subscription to The Atlantic, so I was happy to the author provides the full text at his web site:

http://www.jonathanrauch.com/jrauch_articles/2006/05/stoking_the_bea.html


...the most effective constraint of all is to raise taxes and cut spending: exactly the sort of anti-deficit package that anti-tax conservatives pummeled the first President Bush and President Clinton for approving, and exactly the sort of package that the current President Bush and his anti-tax allies are sworn to block.

The conservative movement is in no position to accept or even acknowledge those implications, now that tax cutting has become the long pole in the Republican tent. Therein lies the element of tragedy. By turning a limited-government movement into an anti-tax movement, conservatism has effectively gone into business with the Big Government that it claims to oppose. It is not starving the beast. It is fueling the beast’s appetite. And the beast has a credit card.


Good stuff.

[Montagnard]

5. I really like the comment about "Discount Government."

That is just about the best of all worlds for a "Walmart" country.

[kenny blankenship]

6. But over time it can 'bankrupt' the G. --reduce creditworthiness

make debt more costly to take on and eventually place the government in the box in which conservatives want it to be confined: a government strictly to be used to steal resources from foreign countries, to enforce monopolies/oligopolies and shield them from competition, and to keep the poor down, here and elsewhere, with "police actions"--law and warfare.
Over the long term, cutting taxes may collapse the government reducing its ability to take on any but the most skeletal responsibilities and force it to shed those it undertook generations ago--that's the conservative dream anyway.

[Roland99]

7. Perhaps that's the PLAN?! Gorge the beast until it explodes & guess what?

Feed the gov't and make themselves and their cronies rich as fvck and then bankrupt the country while they sit on mountains of cash and become the controllers of the nation.