Shell Games

Shell Games

Kevin Williamson at the National Review nicely sums up what's so enervating about the usual tax-cuts-vs.-stimulus-spending debate:

[I]f we cut taxes without cutting spending, we are not cutting taxes. We are deferring taxes. Taxes are not the problem; spending is the problem. Taxes are a symptom. . . . There is no substitute for consuming less than you produce, either at the individual level, the household level, or the national level. JFK never really understood that, very probably because he had servants to lift his fingers.

Williamson concludes with a proposal to cut farm subsidies. How about we throw out the entire Department of Agriculture instead? And the Department of Education right after it.

The commenters, as usual, went straight to the argument about whether it's fair to cut Social Security. I appreciated the most recent post:

Would you rather pay 2% of your income into a scheme that is honestly labelled as straight-up welfare for poor, old people, and there is no pretence that you are ever going to get anything out of it? Or would you prefer the current system, where the government takes 15% of your income and invests it worse than you would in a Vegas casino? I know which one I'd choose. That's the endpoint which should be reached with as much fairness as possible to people who have already "paid in."

A lot of what's wrong with our tax system is that we try to hide the "straight-up welfare," mixing it in with self-funding pension plans and insurance schemes for camouflage. We confuse all these aspects until it's almost impossible to have a rational discussion about what our obligations are to the most desperate of our citizens, and how much each American should be expected to spend on them. We've already reached the point where people can talk about writing "insurance" for those who already are ill with expensive diseases -- a turn of phrase that shows a profound confusion between hedging unknown risks and bestowing charity on people who are far past the "risk" stage.

h/t The Daily Caller