Saw from Best of the Web this opinion piece from the New York Times editorial board arguing that tax breaks are akin to government spending. Wow. How sick and twisted do you have to be to consider letting people keep their hard-earned money a government expense? I don’t even know how you reason with someone like that. You probably just have to punch the hippie.
“The biggest government expense are tax cuts!”
**PUNCH!**
“Ow! But if you look at how tax breaks are factored in the budget–”
**PUNCH!**
“Ow! I’m just–”
**PUNCH**
“…”
Argument won!
The country has a lot of problems right now, and it will require a lot of hippie punching to get through them because we don’t even have time to try and reason with these people. Like with minimum wage. Everyone is like “Duh… we should raise minimum wage. Then we should raise it again! And again! Now everybody rich!” Trying to explain the economics to these people is just way too hard; much easier would be to have business owners punch supporters of raising the minimum wage in the face. If people are punched by enough business owners, they’ll learn to avoid messing with businesses so they don’t get punched. Hippie punching isn’t the same as convincing people, but it gets the same result. And right now with as bad as things are, that’s what we need to focus on.
Clearly, it is clobberin’ time.
what if we run out of hippies before the New York Times runs out of stupid ideas?
“Tax breaks are akin to government spending.”
Similarly, the AP reported recently [“Report: High school dropouts cost economy billions”
Associated Press | Feb 25, 2013| Philip Elliott] that:
“High school dropouts are costing some $1.8 billion in lost tax revenue every year” because of lost taxes.
The fact that more tax money is not coming in is not literally “costing” the government anything. It’s tough luck for the government that people make certain decisions, but the government does not “deserve” tax revenue that it’s not getting.
AP and the New York Times play games with words and concepts, to turn things into ‘givens’ when they are not.
My hands are kind of sore from punching lots of hippies (well, not really hippies, but I’ve been working in Ames, where there are lots of college students, who are the closest thing to hippies that we have in Iowa). Can I pistol-whip the hippies instead?
Love it! If the hippie is too big, though, or has lots of friend hippies nearby, here’s another idea: http://www.nukingpolitics.com/2013/03/stupid-stupid-stupid.html#more
To be fair, tax expenditures are government handouts in many cases. If no rational capitalist would invest in wind farms, battery powered cars, or ethanol plants absent government subsidies, you would call those subsidies expenditures. Just because the subsidies take the form of tax credits or otherwise disallowable depreciation deductions that reduce government revenues doesn’t mean that they are not economically equivalent to subsidies (and are economically less efficient). Subsidies piss money down a rat hole; most tax expenditures do the same thing but require an army of IRS agents, lawyers, and lobbyists to help (think Obamacare).
Letting people keep more of their hard earned money for doing what they would have done ANYWAY is not, in my mind, a tax expenditure; it is just good tax policy. Creating tax incentives to coerce a free people to do something they would not have done otherwise in their own enlightened and informed self-interest most definitely is a form of government spending.
#2 – jw,
there’s always the Hulk option.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unKcLqtrvjw
“Everyone is like “Duh… we should raise minimum wage. Then we should raise it again! And again! Now everybody rich!” ”
$22 minimum wage: Could it pass Congress?
[The Christian Science Monitor ^ | March 19, 2013 | Peter Grier]
Should the minimum wage be $22 an hour? That’s what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts suggested at a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
Here’s her logic: If you took the minimum wage from 1960 and indexed it for workers’ gains in productivity, it would be $22 an hour today. And why shouldn’t employees reap the benefits of their own improved labor practices?, she asked at the hearing, rhetorically. Today, the actual minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
“What happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker,” Senator Warren said.
All the money belongs to the government. It it let’s you keep some of it, clearly that is an expense to the government. Karl Marx had that figured out in 1848 – surely you’ve had enough time to catchup!
If governments mint money, then clearly all money belongs to the government, and they just let us use it temporarily.
To be free, we have to start minting our own money.
“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private, and backed by the full faith and credit of (fill in the blank)”
Works for me.