I guess I've never understood people's frustrations with the paying of taxes. I've always looked at it as your dues for living in this great country, which needs a lot of maintenance (shouldn't there be a price to live in this society?).
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
I don't object to the existence of taxes. (Though I do consider some forms of taxes more egregious than others, like, say, any tax whose incidence is based upon a condition precedent of giving.)
What I object to is excessive government spending. The federal government for most of my lifetime has spent almost 30 percent or more of GDP. (And recently, that number has pushed past 40%.) And I am convinced, utterly, that
most of that spending represents activities that either (a) are wholly unnecessary -- e.g., the average congresscritter's salary and 90% of its perks -- or could be performed cheaper AND more productively by people who were enabled only to the extent that they are valued in the market rather than enabled only by their ability to coerce compliance with their wishes.
And taxes are the ultimate instrument of that coercion. Government can spend ever increasing amounts in ever increasing interference/distortion of costs and benefits because they aren't subject to the market constraint of having to find people to trade with for what they do. All they have to do is consent among themselves, "on behalf of the governed," and then send out tax collectors to acquire the financing. Or, worse, send out the Fed and the Treasury to decrease the value of the currency in ways that take the financing from those as yet unborn (i.e., the people paying taxes when the debt financing has to be repaid).
Are there things that we need government to do or help with? Sure, Some "maintenance" things that we need even the feds for? Sure. The Marines come to mind. Treaties and foreign policy more generally. Interstate transportation (national highways and navigable waterways. Courts. Some national parks.
But these things are a *fraction* of what taxes pay for. These things are a *fraction* of what government spends on, a *fraction* of what it purports to "need" tax revenue for.
Save for cases of imminent invasion, in my opinion the federal government's ability to tax (and hence to spend) should be capped. (And re: the "imminent invasion" exception, think War of 1812 here, or perhaps Pearl Harbor, not any "threat to national security" that has been trumpeted since, at the very latest, the first decade of the Cold War.) And that ability to spend should not be capped by things as tissue-paper nebulous as "debt ceilings" and "budget resolutions." Or even just by a "balanced budget amendment." Capped by a Constitutional prohibition that says that the federal government can in a year spend no more than a fixed percent of the prior year's GDP.
No, that's not restrictive enough. No more than a fixed percent of the non-government-spending part of the prior year's GDP.
Personally I'd put that "spending ceiling percentage" very low, as in pre-New Deal, pre-WWI levels, at about 10-12% . (In my mind, the real blame for the growth of government lies not with the Obama and the Bush Junior or with any president from Nixon on. Those people have been bozos, each worse than the one who came before in their spending profligacy, but they have profligate in part because their predecessors built the foundations of government doing all the stuff that it does. From Wilson getting us involved in the most destructive war in human history to Johnson's Great Society, they morphed government from its role as a maintenance worker to its current role as primary provider for the family.
We need the government to do janitor tasks and Maytag repairman tasks. We don't need government to be our mommy and our daddy and the payer of allowances.
Unfortunately, the doting grandparents of Wilson and Hoover and FDR and Johnson, followed by the Boomer Era parents of Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Bush Jr. and Obama, have made us so co-dependent we are unaware of our addictions.
So much so that not even "fiscal conservatives" are going to consider my 10-12% figure realistic.
Heck, I'd be satisfied with a spending ceiling of 30 percent at this point.
Not that it'll happen.
I fully expect that percentage to continue to rise. We've become a nation of lemmings, and we're going to end up like the lemmings do.
We're running toward the cliff, all the while pushing the accelerator and calling for more speed.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)