There's a multi-blog dialogue on taxes going on among several of the AOL Journals. Progressive Musings has a 10-post series on the topic starting here: Taxes (Part 1). I'm glad to see I'm not the only one impatient for the expanded character limit to take effect!
He refers us to entries at Think It Over (How Much Is Enough?) and Tank Gurl (I want My Money Back part One [of 3]). Tank Gurl is one of the blog currently featured at the AOL Election Sideshow Page.
This discussion reminded me of a comment I saw from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith years ago. He noted that every few years, reporters go out to find out what people are thinking about taxes. They then make the surprising discovery that people of means would prefer not to pay taxes! Then we get reports about a new "tax revolt" brewing out there in the hinterlands.
During Clinton's Presidency, he held back from major new initiatives in social spending (at least after his major overhaul of health-care financing was rejected) in favor of bringing the budget into balance and pay down the debt.
But after putting the federal government on a very sound fiscal basis, the Bush II Administration came in with a Republican Congress, blew out the projected surpluses and ran up huge deficits, mainly through huge taxes subsidies to the wealthiest but also by runaway pork-barrel spending.
A Kerry Administration couldn't afford (literally) to continue the Bush mega-deficits. But would Kerry want to repeat the Clinton experience of making years of difficult choices to bring the budget into balance only to have a later Republican administration come in and fritter it away on tax cuts for those who least need them?
I'm tempted to think the deficit goal for a Democratic Administration should be to hand the next Republican administration exactly the same level of deficits Bush leaves in January of 2005.
5 comments:
i've got a better idea. let's not have any more republican administrations. okay?
Funny, Mari! I had the same idea!
Keeping the deficit at the same level for 20 or 30 years sounds do-able to me. :) - Bruce
The deficit or the debt? We can probably survive with the debt level where it is now, but we can't continue to just keep adding hundreds of billions to it every year. Eventually the foreign bond markets are going to quit financing that.
Actually, I didn't mean that quite so literally. But I *do* think the Dems have to be careful about leaving the federal government in such a large, uncommitted surplus foreseen for the future. Which is what they did under Clinton-Gore. And then Bush used the surplus as an excuse to give that amount away and much more. - Bruce
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