The New Mythology

One reason behind liberals’ psychosis for higher taxes and spending is the persistent gap between

very prosperous and not-very-prosperous people.  Driven, objective-oriented, enterprising people always seem to find new ways to make money while others seldom do, in spite of the heavy taxes levied on those entrepreneurs and the generous subsidies lavished on the middle class and the poor.  This should illustrate simple human nature and the futility of the Big Government paradigm but for the Left, it stokes frustration and anger, frustration that higher taxes don’t stop rich people from getting rich and anger that they would dare to do so.  Don’t they know that a classless society would be best for everyone? If everyone shared the same staid, mediocre standard of living with nobody being super-rich and nobody being super-poor, then class envy would cease and a new era of human life would begin, and though this dream has mesmerized liberals for 100 years, it ignores basic human nature.  If I have no incentive to excel, to invent new things or start a new business or take any kind of risk, then I’ll sit on my hands and wait for my welfare check like everyone else; conversely, if I lack the intelligence or the training or the special skills or drive to excel and I’m one of the people who depend on risk-takers for my welfare check, then I’m in a very precarious position indeed.  The Soviet Union discovered this truth to its cost, China discovered it and adapted before it also collapsed. Cuba and North Korea and Venezuela and Bolivia and Nicaragua may rail against capitalism but they depend on it for their very lives while Europe grapples with the reality that hard-working and thrifty Germans cannot support the rest of Europe on their own: There’s something wrong with asking them to pay higher taxes so Greeks can retire at 45.

Highly intelligent and possessed of rarefied sensitivities as he is supposed to be, however, Priest-King insists that the problems that other countries have had with socialism are attributable to the fact that he wasn’t in charge.  If Great Britain was teetering on economic collapse in 1979, then the problem wasn’t egregiously high taxes and welfare spending but rather he wasn’t there to raise them even higher.  A devotee of the Keynesian school of economic thought, Priest-King believes that government spending stimulates growth, so if you want faster growth, you spend more.  This would be fine if government actually generated its own revenue but everyone, including Priest-King, knows it does not.  Government takes money from people and businesses who’ve earned it and redistributes it as the government sees fit, something like giving yourself a transfusion and about as likely to stimulate economic growth with the exception that, with a transfusion, you don’t incur debt.  It’s an inescapable fact that Priest-King and his coterie of hypnotized followers choose to ignore, instead choosing to believe that if the poor and the middle class are subsidized just enough,  they’ll attain a new level of affluence and security and if the rich are taxed just heavily enough, they’ll stop outperforming their neighbors and accept a lower standard of living for themselves.  Priest-King has vigorously exercised his belief over the past six years, spending over $20 trillion ($8 trillion of which was borrowed), creating a gigantic new Federal construct for rationing health care, spending trillions of dollars on stimulus projects that didn’t exist, home mortgage bailouts and car company bailouts and green energy projects that failed and yet the economy remains punch-drunk.  Over five million jobs have been eliminated during his administration and if unemployment has declined, it has declined because people have either given up looking for work entirely or accepted a part-time job because no full-time jobs were available.  Meanwhile, Wall Street sets records and the gap between rich and poor has actually widened, so given the results achieved, one would conclude that Priest-King’s policies have failed utterly to attain his goal, but that would require intellectual honesty which Priest-King does not have.  His political philosophy is founded on class warfare and using government as a cudgel to beat the bourgeoisie into submission, so rather than abandon an approach that has clearly flopped, he soldiers on, defiantly.  His FY2016 budget rests at $4.1 trillion with at least $438 billion of new debt, he proposes to cancel the sequestration cuts that have only moderately slowed government spending and instead raise spending by 7% across the board; he further proposes to increase taxes by $2 trillion over the next ten years (including a 14% tax on U.S. corporate profits held overseas) and to offer the first two years of community college for free, which of course means that someone else gets the bill.  This is a preposterous budget made more so by the fact that Priest-King suffered yet another punishing mid-term defeat only three months ago.  He faces strong Republican majorities in the House and Senate and in state legislatures across the country and rather than at least attempt to negotiate with the opposition, he raises his middle finger.  This may be red meat to his true believers on the Left but it also defies reason: Colossal taxes and spending have not helped and cannot help the poor because they do nothing about the natural ability some people have toward industry and prosperity and the natural inclination of others to stay exactly where they are.  Saying so may cause Nancy Pelosi’s head to explode but it’s the truth nonetheless.  We would all be better off if Priest-King proposed cutting the top individual and top corporate tax rates to 25% respectively, eliminating capital gains taxes and balancing the Federal budget by 2025, recognizing that doing so would energize prosperous people to expand existing businesses or start new ones, buy new equipment or floor space, hire more workers and invest and create better jobs and thereby help everyone, but he is indeed the Priest-King and he knows better than everyone else and that in a nutshell explains why the suffering will continue, unabated.