Taxes and Spending

The most devastating effects of taxation--as with  robbery, burglary, and other forms of
confiscation--are the ones we can't see. 

Consider the relative tax bite affecting rich and poor: it is the people earning the highest income who pay the bills from government. 

The American founders struggled for liberty against grasping government officials. But the despotism of their day was nothing compared with our own. 

Reich, Gore, and McCain warn that keeping more wealth in private hands would threaten prosperity. This claim is absurd. 

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith assailed American spending patterns. Consumers, he told us in The Affluent Society, spend too much on such fripperies as large tailfins on cars.

The US government is now awash in revenue, owing to the economic boom that has dramatically enlarged the pie on which the state can gorge itself. And yet the Clinton administration not only refuses to curb the rates, even a smidgeon, but it wants to trade some higher taxes for a few more targeted loopholes. Meanwhile, the GOP is promising-yet again-to cut taxes. But like Lucy with the football, no one believes it any more.

The good news that tax audits and property seizures are down obscures a more important point: by slow degrees, step by step, the tax man in America has gained total control over everyone's economic life.

The Virginia legislature has been toying with the idea of curbing or even abolishing sales taxes. The idea comes in response to merchants who fear that they are losing because of the availability of untaxed goods purchased over the web. Whether big changes in the tax code happen this year or five years from now, clearly the battle over net taxation has just begun.

The Republican Congress, fearful of taking on a Democratic president who plays the class-warfare card, again has failed tens of millions of small American businesses and families: The death tax lives. And tens of thousands of small businesses are at risk as long as it survives.

Statism has so permeated our culture that even the games we play reflect the popular belief in omnipotent government. For example, one of the most successful computer games of all time is the SimCity series, which requires the player to plan a city in exhaustive detail from uninhabited terrain. Over five million copies of the game have been sold, and each version to date has reflected a government-centered view of the world.