Taxes and Spending

Mark Thornton explains why he won't sign a statement endorsing Bush's economic plan.

Once we accept that government has a legitimate role in divvying out economic favors among its citizens, on what basis do we make moral distinctions among competing demands?

Bill Anderson explains why politicians treat budget surpluses as their own personal reward, and wouldn't think of giving the money back from whence it came.  

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 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.