Paragraph of the week comes courtesy of William Voegeli, who writes in defense of the anti=tax absolutism of the GOP:
These critics (of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist) would have you believe that the antitax movement is nothing but belligerent extremism. The truth, however, is that you don’t have to embrace Norquist’s famous ambition—to shrink government until it’s small enough to be drowned in a bathtub—to conclude that opposing tax increases is both smart politics and wise policy. Nor do you have to make the maximalist supply-side assertion that tax cuts always pay for themselves. In rejecting tax hikes, Republicans aren’t trading in fanaticism. Rather, they’re confronting a governing failure—an abiding lack of candor about what our welfare state costs—that voters grasp but Democrats refuse to admit.
Read the whole thing.
Democrats and their voters have never been intellectual paragons - when your raison d'etre can be summed up literally as buying votes, how can you be? - but that last 10 years have seen a real devolution in their rhetoric. The insults hurled at the likes of George W Bush and Sarah Palin, from all levels of the Democrat-media complex, were much worse than anything said about Ronald Reagan or Clarence Thomas. You never previously saw leading Dem politicians like the president and the minority House leader (and former Speaker) publicly embrace a riotous socialist movement like Occupy. And, you never previously saw Democrat appartchiks insulting Catholic bishops and demanding that they pay for contraception (with the prospect of Catholic Church funded abortions on the horizon). And so on.
But, you also never saw thousands of people descend upon Capitol Hill on the eve of a vote on a massive expansion of the entitlement state and loudly (but peacefully!) declare their full-throated opposition, as happened on the weekend before the Obamacare vote.
The Dems' increasingly strident behavior is a reflection not of strength, but of desperation. They may hold power now, and they may have enough votes to remain in power in the future (they certainly do here in CA). But there is no money, and the opposition is getting more organized, and obstinate by the day.
Democrats may be dumb, but some of them can still do math, and the numbers are not good.
I sometimes wonder if we conservatives are *too* anti-tax. The purpose of taxes is to fund the legitimate functions of government, and if the legitimate functions of government require more money, then so be it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not that we're taxed too highly, but that we're spending *way* too much money on activities that are *not* the legitimate functions of government. We're even spending too much money on some of the legitimate functions!