A telling anecdote at the end of today’s Bleat sums up one of the attitudes I find most distasteful about today’s Left. I realize that not all Kerry supporters are this clueless, but I also know she’s not alone. It boggles my mind that anyone can not only reach their twenties with such a vague notion of economics, but actually expect others to find their worldview attractive and persuasive. I’ll excerpt the relevent portion here. The context is that a girl came to Lileks’ door campaigning for Kerry, and had finished up her spiel by pointing out that Kerry would roll back the Bush tax cuts.
Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide – from the guys who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light fixtures. It’s called economic activity. What’s more, home improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn’t shoot up, I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen – I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?
“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.
“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”
“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”
“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”
That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:
“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
Then she left.
And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It’s the philanthropist in me.
Just to uphold the liberal side..
Tax cuts are all well and good..
but running up huge 500 billion dollar deficits while pushing tax cuts–like the inheritance tax and dividends tax cuts–that go to the top 10% (and for some of these the top 1%) is not particularly financially sound…
I’m all for tax cuts that actually give working class people more money.. as I think Warren Buffet noted–Giving 300,000 working class families another $1000 to put into the economy is a hell of a lot better than giving him a $300,000,000 tax break… (which is what happened with the recent tax cuts…
If only the bushies would actually be straight up true fiscal conservatives, I would have a lot more respect for them.. Instead.. they just talk the talk, but don’t actually walk the walk…
Re: Just to uphold the liberal side..
If only the bushies would actually be straight up true fiscal conservatives, I would have a lot more respect for them.. Instead.. they just talk the talk, but don’t actually walk the walk…
I hear ya man. And if the Kerry chick had made points about fiscal responsibility she wouldn’t be worthy of mocking. It’s specifically the attitude of “that money isn’t/shouldn’t be yours in the first place” that I’m taking issue with.
Re: Just to uphold the liberal side..
yeah.. that specific point about the money is truly ridiculous.. the person obviously doesn’t have any idea about how finances are done…
What both sides need to come clean about is that in any sound financial arrangement in the public sphere taxes=services or at least, taxes taken should correspond to services given…
Thus.. using tax money for little pork barrel projects is fine as long as everyone is clear about this and agrees to it…
On the flip side.. people should also be clear that tax cuts directly correspond to service cuts … unless you want to run up serious amounts of debt… and the problem with the whole of the american populace is that they are all happy to have lower taxes.. but they don’t want to acept the lower levels of services that are offered…
Well.. I should prolly be more specific.. The extremely wealthy would be happy to get rid of most of the services offered by the government, since they don’t use them.. (excepting services like “tax incentives” and government grants to found new industries and such things… i.e. corporate welfare… ).. but I find it ridiculous that average joe schmo american–who does benefit from certain kinds of regulations (like those supposed to keep track of corporate accounting practices) is going along with tax cuts without paying attention to the fact that the service cuts that occur might actually cause them more financial harm than the money they are getting back…
Not that this is always the case–there is lots of government waste, I grant that wholeheartedly–but I would also note that if you are in most of the corporate world– there is an exceptional amount of corporate waste also!!! and a whole lot of corporate thievery too…
thus.. I think the main lesson for lefties, righties, and those in between is that we need to balance the big players in our society against each other in a productive way… Extremes of either sort only lead to abuses and to a vast SCREWING OVER of the peasants.. err.. I mean the general citizenry.. 🙂
There’s only one problem with this. When people’s taxes were cut, I didn’t see a penny of it. No, they just kept taking my money. As a matter of fact, they kept taking my money and then they raised my university’s tuition. Oh, yeah. So sorry, I’m not conservative and I’m never going to BE conservative, at least not on an economic scale.