Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs this morning on MNBC’s Morning Joe repeatedly uttered this tired liberal refrain:
Tax the rich.
Former-conservative Joe Scarborough tepidly challenged him by declaring “we can’t tax our way out of this,” to which the brilliant scholar replied:
Oh, yes we can.¹
I’ll say it again: It takes deep thinking and a lot of hard work to reduce the size of government. Left-wing ideologues like Sachs clearly don’t want to think that deeply or work that hard, so, instead, they propose confiscations of wealth from specific classes of Americans that will increase, rather than decrease, the size of government.
It is simply outrageous that supposedly intelligent people like Mr. Sachs cannot recognize a vicious cycle when it spirals upward and smacks them in the face:
When the only remedy for a budget deficit is the expansion of government through increased taxes that expansion becomes permanent.² And, since future new programs will require new money, that new money must come from – you guessed it - increased taxes.
Anyone with an IQ of greater than 80 could bombast the “conclusion” that we can “solve” our deficit problem by forcing citizens to give more of their money to the government, but intellectual elites like Jeffrey Sachs should be able to give us something more thoughtful and nuanced.
Footnotes:
¹ Reminds me of the argument I had with a childhood friend of mine when we were six years old – “Am not. Are too. Am not. Are too.”
² If you don’t favor cost cutting as an approach to budget control, every increase in government must be permanent.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Linda Beale // Feb 20, 2011 at 11:12 pm
Peter
Let’s think about this reasonably. We know that Social Security and Medicare, for example, both helped us move from a country that treated its elderly and sick with disdain, allowing them to suffer terribly, to a country that treated them with respect. Why wouldn’t everyone think it reasonable to retain those programs. Now, costs for those programs will go up because there are baby boomers now inching towards retirement. We should cover those costs, shouldn’t we? If not, why not–why is it suddenly a bad idea? Taxing ourselves more in order to be able to do so is reasonable–and we can do it since most Americans weren’t even in favor of the Bush tax cuts when they started (of course, once you have a tax cut, you tend to want to keep it.) We should tax corporations more and we should tax the rich more–with rates increasingly steep up to 15 or 20 million of taxable income. (Our current brackets reflect a long-ago era when $350,000 was super rich, whereas these days we have the superrich making multiple millions and even billions.) We should reinstate a reasonable estate tax–an exemption of a couple of million but increasingly progressive rates on the estate inexcess of that amount. And get rid of the GRATs and GRUTs and all of those devices that people use to avoid the estate tax. We should tax the poor less–neither payroll nor income taxes on the first $20,00o or so. It’s called progressive taxation, and it has gone along with broad-based growth that benefits the whole economy, whereas tax cuts and accretion of wealth to the few at the top does nobody else much good, destroys democracy, and creates plutocracy.
Yes, we should cut wasteful spending too. We don’t need to spend nearly so much on the military as we currently spend. We could cut back on that substantially. But we need to spend more on infrastructure and on education and on basic research. We can do that with reasonable tax increases.
What you never acknowledge is that the policies of tax cuts just haven’t worked. And a blunt ax to expenditures is just as senseless. We need to cut wasteful spending, but we also need to increase spending on human capital and infrastructure. To pay for that and help pay down the borrowing necessitated by the Bush wars and the Bush tax cuts, we must increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
2 Patent Agent // Feb 24, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Not just ‘cut back on wasteful spending’. What is wasteful in the eyes of one, may not be in the eyes of another. My colleague above doesn’t view defense as important for high levels of spending.
I would direct attention to efficiency rather than which areas should be cut. lets cut all areas the same amount – and then increase efficiency in them all. I think the inefficiencies in today’s operations are the real enemy.
3 Simon Kokoyo // May 16, 2011 at 10:45 am
Government generate money through various taxes collected from it citizens. I think taxing the rich more increases demand for accountability. I Africa it is the poor who more to sustain the political elite and ruling class. The rich are more informed and are bound to demand for better services onbehalf of the voiceless