The household echo then was to balance the budget in seven years. Why wait that long, or why not five, ten or twelve years? In the past, revenue enhancement was the strategy to reduce deficits. Washington D.C. over the Reagan years forgot this tactic because it meant whipping the hides of corporations and the wealthy. When Clinton revived the strategy in '93 by raising the marginal tax of the $200,000 income threshold in order to bring down the escalating deficits, the Republicans and most of the Dixiecrats mounted their war horses and waved the banner of "Contract with America."
The thrust of the contract is less central government; in reality, it means that state & local government will be—unfortunately in most cases, regressively—the overwhelming force to levy tax and to decide our fate. In the more advance states of the nation it has been just that anyway—usually they include a more progressive income tax to give more support to education and the general infrastructure —yet still have higher sales and user tax as a rule. It is arrant sophistry to deduce that by reducing "government spending" is inducing the rise of self-determination. Government in a complex interdependent society is never going to "wither away"; we tend in frustration to forget the obvious of government, which is to protect us from each other and unscrupulous organizations and local governments bent on fleecing the individual. Government ideally is the bastion of law, without which we cannot survive.
If a white gentleman in, say, Mississippi, had no conscience, he should like nothing better than to see a greater share of the national coffers coming to the state treasury, knowing full well that he shall benefit at the expense of the black teenage mother, who will thus emigrate to a northern state to join her relatives who had made the move after World War II to escape the impassioned intransigence effected by the federal incursion of civil rights. Caught up in "Newtonian" rhetoric, citizens who yearn for the mythology of the rugged individualist who goes it alone, allow themselves to be duped because at the moment they feel good health, have a secure job and solemnly believe they need no safety net. Good for them, but what of the millions of others dying of cancer and AIDS, children in school who are not gifted with academic minds, the homeless, the kid caught up in a gang war, the elderly racked with pain and health bills, the blue collar distressed over imminent closing of the town's factory, or the white collar worker beset by still another merger ineluctably effecting downsizing?
Most people thinking clearly would at the very least choose a government led by the likes of Dole or Luger. After all, the roots of the party of Lincoln, preclude Newt's freshman brats eager to hack away at the keystone that reinforces the greatness of this country and has made us the envy of the world. The Republican party of responsibility—apparently but a memory —believe there has to be a strong central government or there will be disastrous divisiveness in domestic and foreign affairs.
Copyright © 2005 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: December 18, 2005.
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