Can We Afford a Tax Cut?

March 6, 2001

President Bush’s very modest tax cut proposal is being debated with all the passion that raged over the Emancipation Proclamation, and for the same reason. At stake is the question whether some men have the right to live at the expense of others.

Today the taxing power, rather than chattel slavery, is the instrument by which the parasitical element of the population subsists. And that element, which includes politicians, panics at the slightest reduction in the state’s power to plunder. Once you start liberating taxpayers, even a little tiny bit, nobody knows where it may end.

Maybe — horrors! — the income tax will be abolished. Not that Bush contemplates such an atrocity. But the parasites, their armpits hot with sweat, feel that he is playing with fire. He may arouse passions nobody can control, such as “greed” — defined as the desire to keep your own money. (Wanting someone else’s money is no longer greed, it’s “need.” And the politician’s eagerness to cater to “need,” thus defined, is no longer demagogy, but “compassion.”)

The Democrats and liberals argue against a tax cut “right now” (as if they might favor it at some more propitious moment) on grounds that “we can’t afford it.” Since when have they turned into thrifty bookkeepers? Usually people who say they “can’t afford” things mean they have to reduce their spending. But the Democrats oppose spending reductions!

They aren’t complaining that Bush is also proposing more spending every year, including doubling Medicare funding over the next decade. No, that’s fine by them. In their minds, we “can’t afford” to cut taxes, but we can afford to keep increasing federal spending.

Obviously they really mean to say that they want to keep feeding the parasites, but they don’t want to give the host any relief. For them this is really a matter of principle, not thrift. Their ideology mandates that government keep growing at all times, expanding its power over the productive host — the taxpayer — and swelling the ranks of the nonproducing parasites, who consume the taxes.

Of course they don’t like to put it this way. They want to keep inching toward socialism without calling themselves socialists. They want to wage class warfare without facing the basic conflict of interests between the two classes, the parasites and the hosts.

In the phrase we can’t afford it, the key word is the pronoun we. The crypto-socialist wants the two classes to believe they are one. The host must be trained to think of himself and the parasite as a single unit, whose interests are identical. He must be so stupefied that he imagines that his burdens are freedoms, and that he owes his freedoms to the state.

The crypto-socialist loves it when taxpayers say they oppose a tax cut. Such taxpayers represent a triumph of propaganda. They actually think it’s in their own interest to pay high taxes! They think of themselves and their natural enemies as we!

The Democrat-liberal propaganda line blames deficits and the national debt on Ronald Reagan, during whose administration federal spending did grow explosively. But this omits a salient detail: Congress, not the president, appropriates money. Ronald Reagan never spent a dime that hadn’t been authorized by Congress. For all eight years he was in office, the House was controlled by the Democrats and for two years both houses of Congress were controlled by them. (The Republicans had a majority in the Senate for six years.)

So the Democrats could have cut federal spending at any time during the Reagan years. But they talk as if they were helpless innocent bystanders while all those trillions were being spent by the wastrel Reagan.

In those days both parties, for opposite reasons, built the myth of Reagan the Budget-Slasher. The Republicans wanted the taxpayers to think Reagan was holding the line against the parasites; the Democrats wanted the parasites to think Reagan was “making war on the poor” (meaning the parasites). If only Reagan had done half the things he was accused of doing!

So here we are, in the era of “compassionate conservatism,” when the taxpayer may well wish that Bush would do half of what the Democrats accuse him of trying to do. We can afford it.

Joseph Sobran