Tax Lawyer's Blog

Paul Krugman, the intellectual leader of the government-expansion crowd, says that those who believe that government bureaucracies are bloated, wasteful and inefficient are destroying America’s infrastructure.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

Of course, this is false and Krugman knows it. Nobody ever said that a dollar collected is a dollar wasted. What we have said is that a dollar collected is forty cents wasted. And that’s plenty enough waste to justify opposition to tax increases.

And it seems Krugman has joined the ranks of those who say that your money belongs to the government and that government only lets you have some of it at it’s pleasure (emphasis is mine):

[I]sn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

And why does he think the government should let rich people keep less of their money? By golly, because that’s the way they do it in other countries:

Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

Krugman then trots out the utterly unproven and unprovable assertion that there isn’t as much waste and fraud as opponents of big government have claimed:

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. 

Using rhetoric that would make a propagandist proud, Krugman intentionally conflates the support of private, free-market enterprise with the opposition to all government.

Nobody - not conservatives, not Republicans, not I - opposes good government. But we have not had good government, but rather, a wasteful nanny-statism that runs counter in every way to the notion of freedom America was founded on.

Finally, he argues that an expanded federal bureaucracy is essential to our well-being as a nation:

And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

Nobel Prize or no, Krugman is wrong again.

Not only governments can provide lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling. In my own sub-development we pay, through our monthly homeowners fees, for many of these very things.  

Someone needs to explain to Mr. Krugman and those of his ilk that we anti-tax folk believe that taking forty percent of a person’s annual income is enough. And that if it isn’t enough, it’s proof that government is incompetent, corrupt and wasteful.

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