Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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- #121
I suppose it might seem counter intuitive, but I believe radically raising taxes across the board - to a point that actually approached a balanced budget - would be the single most important step toward returning to sensibly limited government.
The reason government has grown into such a bloated, pervasive mess is that we're not actually paying for it; we're pushing it off on future generations. We won't be able to have a genuine national discussion on how much government we want and need until we're actually paying for the government we vote for.
Simply raising taxes will not work unless we also make sure they can't borrow more money. We need to require the government to only spend the money it has and only borrow if it can pass both houses and the signature of the president. We also have to make sure they have to pass any resolution to borrow money as a separate bill, not tack it onto something that no one would vote against. That would require a constitutional amendment.
Sure. I'd hoped the complementary requirement of balanced budget was implicit in my suggestion. In any case, my underlying point is that it's irrational to think we can make overbearing government go away by cutting taxes, or that doing so will somehow pressure the statists into backing off. They've shown an enthusiastic willingness to simply sink us all deeper and deeper into debt.
And the point I'm making is that most of us are ok with the status quo because it causes us no immediate pain. If government growth was accompanied by immediate and automatic tax increases, enough to fully fund any new spending, taxpayers would be howling. And that would put pressure on our leaders to curb spending.
We need to spell it out for the idiots that think that getting more money means spending more.