Tuesday, December 5, 2017

The Disingenuous Tax Cut Debate

One of the important drivers of political dysfunction in America is the dishonest framing of debates Americans need to observe. Among the many controversies misrepresented by the commentary class is the tax cut debate. At the heart of the misrepresentation is the “cost” of the tax cut. Tax cuts do not cost money and empirically, they are almost certain to increase revenue to the United States Federal government.
In the current debate, we are told as we have been told by the commentary class since at least the 1980s, that the tax cut will be costly. It will “cost” more than a trillion dollars. It will blow a hole in the deficit. This rhetoric fills newspaper articles designed to attack the tax cut as illegitimate and a plain political contradiction to the conservative conventions of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility. This turns the tax cut into a wedge device asking conservative Republicans to choose between party affiliation and philosophical fidelity. At the heart of this fallacious misrepresentation is an insidious civic assumption: all taxpayer money belongs to the government. Therefore, any failure to collect potential taxpayer assets is a “cost.” The government owns all and allows individuals to keep assets after it has discovered the true priorities for money in the economy. This all coming from a government that also has the power and freely practices the printing of money for its own ends beyond those found in the assets of the taxpayer. None of this prevents the commentary class from falsely intoning that the tax cut will cost the government.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/12/the_disingenuous_tax_cut_debate.html#ixzz50OxgwDoT 

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