You're right: "revenue neutral" is the problem

Reader comment on: Trump Tax Cut

Submitted by Harr Binswanger (United States), May 3, 2017 12:35

This is one of the best points I've seen in a while:

"The language about "revenue gaps" and "borrowing" seems to assume that the government has an automatic claim on this privately earned money to begin with."

Every dollar the government spends is a dollar it took out of the private economy. So when they ask "How are we going to pay for these cuts" the meaning is: "How are we going to continue to make you suffer as much as we did before?"

And your putting it into terms of a "claim" on our money is excellent. The whole perspective o Democrats and (almost all) Republicans is that they have a right to our earnings.

Imagine how things would sound if they used the "looting" language of Atlas Shrugged:

"The tax cuts are loot-neutral--we in the government don't have to worry about a loot-gap." And then Democrats would be understood as saying: "This bill is unfair because it means we'll have to loot the biggest producers a little less. We'll still take a lot more loot from them than from any other segment of the population, but we wouldn't be smacking them around as much as we ought to be. After all, what sort of moral degeneracy leads a man to create a lot of value?"

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