Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing, reproduces this great chart, showing the number of people who, after receiving the benefits of a government social program, still believe they are not using government social programs:

He editorializes:

It’s the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.

While I am second to none in slamming those in the  ”Keep your government hands off my Medicare” crowd, this graph doesn’t exactly say that.  Doctorow says “subsist on” but that’s not really what the chart says.  It just points out that one is receiving a government benefit of any value, not that one subsists on it, or even enjoyed net benefits from it.   To take a specific example, as far as I can tell (I don’t recognize all the items listed), the only one that I have received is the mortgage interest deduction.  Yet, as a crazy libertarian, I would indeed say “I am not on a government social program.”

You can say that’s me being hypocritical, but when you compare the amount of money I gain from that tax credit, compared to the money I pay in taxes to support all those other things that I do not benefit (you can argue that I may one day benefit, or that they provide a protective net) from, it’s hardly fair to say that I benefit from (much less subsist on!) government programs as a whole, as the net benefit to me of them is negative.  In fact, for at least some relatively large section of the population, the net benefit must be negative, in order to balance the other section (those for whom the social program is surely designed) for whom the benefit is positive.  I would gladly forgo that tax credit if I could get out of even one or two of those other programs — social security being top of the list.  The endpoint of this logic is that we would claim that a person who pays 1o dollars in taxes to support “government social programs” and only receives 2 dollars in benefit from them is a hypocritical jerk for not thinking they were beneficiaries of these programs. (more…)

Tim is now writing at Forbes.com.  You should go read it!

The entire problem with the budget is this: both Republicans (hardcore anti-nominal-tax ones and the regular brand) and Democrats don’t understand that spending is equivalent to raising taxes.  What we usually call “raising taxes” is just balancing the checkbook later on.  Once the government declares that it has spent a dollar, it has raised taxes, because that dollar (and any attendant interest that is accumulated in the span of time between spending and acquisition) must be physically acquired by one of the following “national checkbook balancing” methods:

1. What we usually call “raising taxes” — i.e. signing a bill in congress that actually empowers the IRS to deduct one dollar from some taxpayer’ account.
2. Printing it — which causes inflation, and therefore, all else held equal, makes everyone else slightly less wealthy. (you can argue that it has other good effects, or is better than option 1, that’s fine — it is still inflation)
3. By refusing to physically acquire it, or defaulting, which increases the actual cost of every other dollar the government spends, which then must be acquired via option 1 or 2.

This has three implications for those congressmen who took Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge: (though it’s obvious neither he nor they interpret it this way, though that’s merely their ignorance)

1. If they ever voted for increasing spending, they violated their pledge.  (i.e., almost all of them)
2. If their actions lead to a default, they have violated their pledge, because it will increase the cost of “national checkbook balancing” options 1 and 2 by even more.
3. If they do not vote for combined bills that reduce spending by a higher amount than they allocate to ”national checkbook balancing” option 1 (i.e. what we traditionally view as “raising taxes”) then they are violating their pledge as well. (there are some complicating issues here — you might not want to maintaining long term surpluses, though I think we’re currently at little risk of that, or you might not be convinced that the bill will actually cut spending, but the general principle remains)

As the current budget qualifies (at least as far as it has been explained to me) for category 3, it should be passed — and it would indeed reduce the true level of taxation, consistent with their pledge.

The final implication is that the only people more guilty than those who are hesitating to physically acquire the dollars to balance our spending in the past are those who voted to increase our spending so much in the first place, thereby making these “tax increases” (by either definition) necessary.