Yes, I’d Say Things Are Just Going Swimmingly

Right? Spending’s way waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up, and tax revenues way waaaaaaaaaaay down

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer – Mon Aug 3, 8:51 pm ET
WASHINGTON – The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.

The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.

Sounds like the classic liberal set-up, doesn’t it? (Oh, and by “liberal” I do mean in the late 20th Century sense, not in the ‘classical liberalism’ sense.) Here we have a big-government policy that has failed, and the obvious solution in the Government’s eyes is to pump more money into it. In their eyes, of course, Government is not capable of failure, so if policies are, shall we say, somewhat less effective than planned it is solely due to insufficient resources being allocated (“insufficient resources” being a Latin term that roughly translates as “our goddamned hard earned tax money”); the idea that possibly, scandalously, the policy might be, oh, how to phrase this delicately, completely asinine is never really allowed to even be uttered, let alone seriously debated, because this would undercut and call into question the ever-burgeoning expansion of Government into ever single facet of our lives. And that, Dear Readers, would simply not do.

Simply put, it comes to this

“Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Yet the promises keep on coming, how Government can and will solve everything, in spite of that pesky reality of fewer dollars coming in:

Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.

…While much of Washington is focused on how to pay for new programs such as overhauling health care — at a cost of $1 trillion over the next decade — existing programs are feeling the pinch, too.

Social Security is in danger of running out of money earlier than the government projected just a few month ago. Highway, mass transit and airport projects are at risk because fuel and industry taxes are declining.

The national debt already exceeds $11 trillion. And bills just completed by the House would boost domestic agencies’ spending by 11 percent in 2010 and military spending by 4 percent.

And the promise, the under-girding philosophy we get from Crown Prince Biden?

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

And we called our nuclear policy during the Cold War “MAD”?

Good God.

We must cut government spending, cut taxes so that people have more money to spend as they see fit. Radical, crazy, I know. Now if only i could come up with some catchy phrase for this.

Hey, I got it: how about “Power to the People”

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