Republican for Raising Taxes

As the Indiana legislature and other states' legislatures are closing in on writing their budgets for this budget cycle, we are hearing the typical question of raising or lowering taxes. As with any debate written within the past sixty years, the language of the debate has traditionally been written and dictated by liberal democrats. This has allowed the Democrats to control the emotional response to the message.

As the conservative movement has been able to find its voice after the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions in the White House and House, respectively, it is slowly learning how to choose words that better reflect the true debate.

For example, the debate over estate taxes has been using the language favored by the Democrats. Admittedly Teddy Roosevelt, as I understand it, first pushed the estate tax for the purpose of preventing the super-wealthy of the era from creating a caste system of wealth. He wanted to prevent the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts from controlling America in perpetuity by the power of wealth. He made the faulty assumption that once wealth is created in America, it would stay in the same family forever. Who could argue that huge estates should remain in place forever? How anti-American!

He looked at the history of Europe and its historical wealth and assumed that the "Robber Barons" were accomplishing the same thing by different means. The Democrats of the New Deal thinking picked up the populist notion and ran with it for nearly a century. They kept pointing out how anti-American passing estates from one generation to the next were.

Then the Republicans of the conservative movement learned to change the vocabulary. This tax was imposed when a person died. Without that triggering event, no tax was "recognized" (lawyer word for the reason for a tax being owed). So they changed the debate from the tax on the wealthy (which no one in America feels that they are) to a tax on the dead. This gave the tax a bad taste, even for Democrats.

This change of vocabulary may have the feel of George Orwell's Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth in1984. Changing the words changes the truth, right?

Never fear changing words if they move toward the truth.

The truth is, as I have pointed out in a previous posting, the estate tax is an optional tax that even Bill Gates can avoid. The tax is imposed on the dead uninformed.

Why not call it what it is the uninformed middle class death tax? Well, the Republicans came up with the shorter version: death tax. This changed the entire debate. Now Democrats had to explain why the name "death tax" was an inaccurate description. This opened an old debate subject to previously undiscovered information. The Democrats had a hard time selling a 55% tax rate on the dead. Add to this the last 25 year push for old people to retire on the wealth of their retirement plans rather than guaranteed income streams of pensions, and everyone could be taxed at death. The American dream of wealth for all, the death tax for all.
Even Hillary had to at least support changing the death tax system.

Let's get back to my point: the current budget debates.

The current debate about tax cuts makes the Republicans look stupid. Why "lower taxes" when huge expenditures for war are foreseeable into the future?

The Democrats have made complete mud of this debate, too. Let's pull the definition of words apart and examine this further. I looked up the word "tax." It means, "A contribution for the support of a government required of persons, groups, or businesses within the domain of that government." American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000). It can also be defined as "A charge, especially a pecuniary burden which is imposed by authority." Webster's Rev'd Unabridged Dictionary (MICRA, Inc. 1998). So a tax is the payment to the government and not the calculation method.

So if we look at history a tax cut occurs when the amount of money that a taxpayer pays to the government is reduced. Where do these tax cuts occur? Since the income tax is based on the amount of income a taxpayer has received that year, a tax cut would occur when the size of the check for the taxpayer is reduced. Lower income means bad times. Bad times occured in 1970's and early 1980's. This despite high tax rates. So the Democratic ideal of high tax rates lead to low taxes. The Democrats cut taxes and increased spending (which I knowingly assert without support and will address at a later date). For more information on high tax rates and lower taxes received by the government see the works of Dr. Thomas Sowell, Professor Walter Williams, or Professor Arthur Laffler.

The Democrats have pushed the Karl Marx notion that the best means of taxing a population is by taking for the wealthy and giving to the poor. (No, this is not Robin Hood. The Robin Hood story is based on taking money from the crooked despot King John. So crooked that even his lords found his taxes outrageous and demanded the King sign Magna Carta.)

Despite my respect for Karl Marx's descriptive talents, we ahve yet to find many of his proscriptive and theoretical solutions to work well at all. So maybe we should proactively call this fallacy of cutting tax rates is the equivalent of reducing the taxes flowing to the government.

Presidents Kenney and Reagan have proven that reducing taxes increase taxes.

Let's see the Republicans call a spade a spade: President Bush should call for increased taxes -- by reducing tax rates. By pushing the notion that he is trying to reduce taxes, he is perpetuating the fallacy that tax rates are an accurate proxy for taxes generated. They are not.

Let us destroy one more "fact" of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Republicans must raise taxes!!!