Virginia News Source, Virginia Beach, Virginia

TAX CUTS

Here is the phrase that so, as a matter of blood, divides the Reps from the Dems.  The Reps giveth tax cuts, and the Dems taketh away, so the creed goes. Yet, in the face of this rhetorical war there has not seen a true tax cut in America since at least 1930.   Only, only, only tax increases have occurred since then. In modern parlance a “tax cut” is anything that gives some group a certain new advantage in the tax code over the rest of us serfs.  According to Bush II Reps and previous dreamers, “tax cuts” to certain constituencies are of such tremendous importance to national economic growth all concern over paying now for what the government spends goes out the window.  So long as certain taxpayers today have to pay less than they otherwise would have to, the nation can live with ever increasing trillions of debt to pay for some day.  After all, the Reps are not directly increasing taxes on anyone today. The re-election strategy is that grateful freeloaders of the year will be glad to go to “vote their pocketbook” and even pay mega-millions for negative televisions ads in the next election cycle, all the while decrying “higher taxes”.  There is no connection whatsoever in Washington speak between annual revenues and annual expenditures according to this odd religion.

Unfortunately, there is only one true measure of what the citizens are taxed each and every year.  It is not the revenues taken from the not so well connected at virtual gunpoint.  What the nation has to pay in taxes is not reduced by the amount of this year’s so-called “tax cuts” for the favored few.  Common sense would inform anyone that the rate of taxation each year is the grand amount of expenditures made by government at all levels.  Taxes, paid this year or borrowed against the future, now consume more than half of everything everyone produces in America.  It is a sign of the 20th Century that America has seen only tax increases at all levels of government for so long.  This trend continues to soar on the upswing in recent history.  The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations in power since 1980 chalk up $7.6 trillion of the nation’s $8.5 trillion national debt all the while passing ever-increasing federal spending.  The sole way to bring the first tax cut few have ever seen is a second libertarian revolution in Virginia and beyond, probably some quarter millennium on.    Stephen Merrill, General Counsel, Tidewater Libertarian Party