Is Obama Trying To Pull a Reverse Reagan?
The editorial page editor at the Washington Post had a thought provoking column today.
Since the Reagan era, some conservatives have hoped to shrink government by “starving the beast.” Refuse to raise taxes, they figured, and eventually spending would have to fall.
It’s beginning to look as though the new team may have a similar strategy, in reverse: Increase spending, and eventually taxes will have to be raised…
The bottom line is this: You cannot run a progressive government of the kind Obama favors by collecting only 18 percent of the gross domestic product in taxes, which has been the norm over the past 40 years. Nor can you increase the tax take to 24.5 percent of GDP — which is what Obama proposes to be spending in 2019 — simply by making the rich pay more.
But rather than level with the American people about this, or lay out a plan to raise the needed taxes, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are putting the spending pieces of progressive government in place and apparently counting on the tax piece to fall into place later.
This guy may have divined the Obama administrations plan (in the unlikely event it has one) but his underlying assumptions are pretty much all wrong.
Suppose we’re looking at at massive deficits that we can no longer finance in a couple years. Raising taxes would be the worst thing we could do.
Let’s face it, the US is facing enormous fiscal challenges in the future even without the Obama spending machine getting all they want. Everyone’s known for years and years that Social Security and Medicare were demographic nightmares that were going to cost us in the very near future. Now if you add in all of the spending that Obama wants to do the problem would be even worse.
The only thing that’s going to pay for the Social Security and Medicare nightmare is booming economic growth. We need to have tax rates that encourage growth. We need to get government out of the way rather than mismanage it like the Obama administration is hell-bent to do.
We need to change our immigration policy (or lack thereof) to recruit the best and brightest rather than let in the least educated who need support on the day they get here.
All raising taxes would do is give the government a bigger piece of a smaller pie. That makes it all the worse for those of us in the private sector because not only will we have less income the government will be taking more of it.
What we need to do is tell those living on the government teat is to stop it. That goes for non-productive government employees, welfare cases and yes corporate welfare queens.
Do that and I believe we can weather the storm created by FDR (Social inSecurity) and LBJ (Medicare). Incidentally both of those programs were sold on the idea that they would be much less expensive than they actually are today.
