If it had the will, Congress could kill the redistributionist monster, the Welfare State, that's consumed at least $5 trillion in wealth since the Great Society. How? Cut anywhere and everywhere, abolish whole agencies, and return the $350 billion saved from next year's spending to the taxpayers in the form of a tax cut of the same size.
The Republican Congress has had nine months to reduce taxes. Even one percent would be appreciated. Instead, we get convoluted plans that will be "revolutionary" at some point in the far-distant future. Enough of welfare reform. It's time to reform taxes.
Left-liberals hate the idea, but the prosperity of everyone in a market economy depends in good part on the rich. The capital they have earned and saved generates investments and creates jobs. Their savings keep interest rates low. Their actions are philanthropic in every sense. In their professions, they help everyone prosper. In their charity, they help the poor, and allow the arts and education to thrive.
The income tax has become politically vulnerable. Some politicians have said we should replace it with a national sales tax. Yet, far from reducing the total tax burden, this would merely shift the burden around from individual filers to retailers.
To understand the House Republicans' budget "revolution," pay careful attention to this number: $55 billion. That's the amount federal spending will increase next year. A year later, according to their plan, the budget ticks up another $38.1 billion. It goes up an average of $45 billion every year thereafter.
A poll in March reported that most people would prefer "deficit reduction" to "tax cuts." Polls and the media lie all the time, but this one refutes itself. If people really wanted to be taxed, they would pay up without being threatened by audits, fines, special agents, and jail terms.
Performance budgeting (PB) is the newest strategy to make the public sector work. Yet as with other similar strategies, PB is fundamentally flawed. Without a system of profit and loss, a bureaucracy not only has trouble motivating its employees; it can't determine the value of what they are doing in the first place.
Now that communism has collapsed, the most powerful socialist force in the world is the coalition between George Bush and the national Democratic Party. The Washington establishment has learned absolutely nothing from the collapse of socialism. It still ignores Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School by responding to its worldwide collapse with—you guessed it—more socialism.
In 1928 Herbert Hoover rode the coattails of Calvin Coolidge into the White House, and everyone thought he would hold the line on taxes, for he talked of "individual freedom" and criticized his opponents as "socialists."
As I see it now, there are really two economies—two distinct systems of producing and exchanging wealth. Or rather, two systems that purport to do these things, though only one of them really produces anything, and the other is organized by a peculiar form of exchange.
The first is what is called the trade economy—the one summed up in the phrase "the free market." The other might be called "the tax economy."
