Most everybody with the possible exception of economist Paul Krugman feels that we need to bring our deficit spending under better control. Most everybody agrees that federal spending has gotten excessive and that it needs to be reined in to some degree. Nobody likes the idea of paying more in income and other taxes. I can appreciate the general policy of the Republican Party and the Tea Party faction that tax increases should be avoided. As a general proposition, I have no quarrel with that. What I do not understand is approaching a complex problem like the federal deficit with a hardened position that absolutely no tax increase of any kind, type, character, or amount will be tolerated. Fred Thompson, former Tennessee Senator and Republican Presidential candidate put it simply not long ago. In 2001 and 2003, we had a budget surplus so tax cuts made sense. Today, we have a huge budget deficit and staggering national debt, so the justification for the lower tax rates no longer applies. That seems to me to cut to the heart of the situation.
Republicans, and particularly Tea Party types, are standing firm that they will agree to not one dime of new taxes on any American, no matter how much money they make. And it is worth remembering that income taxes on the affluent and wealthy are now at the lowest point in half a century. So it would be hard to claim that the affluent and wealthy are overtaxed at the moment.
The Tea Party Congressional group and the Grover Norquist Tax Pledge people seem to me to be taking a general principle and exalting the general principle into an overarching goal taking precedence over the basic national good. Some of them in 2011 were actually wishing that the Debt Ceiling raise would fail and that we would as a nation go into default on the full faith and credit of our obligations. Even the uncertainty of that did result in a downgrading of our national credit rating by some raters. Failing to raise the Debt Ceiling in accordance with what we have already borrowed could also result in our having to pay higher interest rates on government bonds and other obligations. Holding the Debt Ceiling hostage is comparable to threatening to crash the airplane if you don't get your way.
When you put this all together with the "hatred of government" banter of the hard Right, you begin to wonder if the goal of the hard Right is to secure a more efficient government or to cripple or destroy the basic functioning of government. Some observers have called the radical right anarchists rather than legislators. If the Tea Party legislators absolutely refuse to make any compromise regarding tax rates, I think it is time to vote them out of office in 2014 and to elect some reasonable, mature individuals to Congress. The goal of keeping taxes as low as possible is something all of us taxpayers can applaud. But destroying the country in the process of pursuing that goal makes absolutely no sense at all. Keeping tax rates low should not trump every other fiscal consideration.
I have long argued that the Tea Party vote and other far right votes are, in fact,votes against democracy. Given the size of international (rather, anational) corporations, a vote to dismantle or radically defund the federal government is a vote to turn the republic over (completely) to private corporate power--plain and simple. I do not know if most Tea Party types, or regular convservatives, understand this rather obvious outcome.
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