Wednesday, August 1, 2001
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Wednesday, August 1, 2001 |
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Where's the vision in Washington? By DAVE HAMRICK You've probably read more than your fill in this space about the tax cut situation, but there's more. Did you ever get one of those itches that you can't quite pinpoint? You just keep scratching a wide area until it starts to feel better. Well, something has been bothering me about the tax cut debate and I just couldn't quite put my finger on it, but the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste helped me find the source. CAGW is as credible a source of information on taxation as I've been able to find. You may disagree with the group's conclusions, but I've never known anyone to successfully impugn its facts. It's frightening how shortsighted our leaders are on both sides of the debate when they talk about issues like tax cuts. There doesn't seem to be any connection with the big picture. Listen to the Bush camp and you get the feeling that they're pushing for tax cuts because, well, that's what Republicans do. Their supporters are generally high achievers and high taxpayers, and if you want to be popular with your supporters you rub it where it hurts. A large segment of the Democrats' base is made up of low achievers who are low taxpayers, or in most cases don't pay any taxes at all. Naturally, Democrats are against tax cuts. They want to spend more money to make that part of their constituency happy. On both sides, this motivation is very thinly disguised. Democrats say we can't afford tax cuts, or we don't need them. Translation: We need to keep taking money from people who are making it OK and giving it to people who aren't. That's how we buy votes. Republicans say that since there's a surplus, it should go back to the people who put it there, the taxpayers. In essence, they're saying the same thing. This is how we buy votes. Obviously, I like the latter method better than the former, but in either case I don't see much long-range vision in evidence. If you have any vision, take a long look back. Citizens Against Government Waste, in its Government Waste Watch newsletter, puts it this way: "The United States was created as the result of a revolution, sparked primarily over burdensome taxation. Colonial Americans didn't revolt because of who taxed them as much as the oppressive level of taxation. "In feudal economies, serfs were beholden to their lords. The lord of the manor could claim as much as one-third of a serf's working time. Serfs would then be allowed to retain two-thirds of their time to produce for their own households. This was essentially a 33 percent tax rate." Compare that to the fact that most Americans pay about 40 percent of their income in taxes, compared to 19th century slaves. CAGW rates their rate of taxation at 50 percent, because they were allowed to work for their own subsistence. "We can take comfort in knowing that by historical standards, we're better off than slaves but worse off than serfs," says CAGW. The cover story, by Shawn McBurney, CAGW's director of government relations, points out that in the midst of World War II, when we were in a desperate struggle to free the world from a deathly tyranny, "the American economy was forced to bear an enormous tax burden 20.9 percent of the total economy to save mankind." The current burden is 20.7 percent. I sympathize with the basic liberal fear that if we reduce taxes and reduce the size of our government over time, important things won't get done and people will suffer needlessly. But the fact is that we could easily do all that can reasonably be done for the poor, fund important scientific and medical research, keep our infrastructure in good shape and fund a solid defense and still reduce the size and scope of the government and not tax our citizens and our economy at a rate comparable to the rate during the worst crisis in our history. What I would like to see from the Republicans is a long-range plan for how to do that, not a ten-year piecemeal tax cut as a reward for voting Republican.
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