I’m not looking forward to the jockeying over our federal budget. Our structural deficit is too huge for our country to operate as it has in the past. The Republicans’ answer to this is basically to gut the federal government and drown it in a bathtub. The Democrats’ answer seems to be to stay in a permanent state of denial. In truth, neither side can do what they want to do. The left would like to tax the affluent to pay for our government without doing any significant entitlement reform, and the right would like to balance the budget by doing away with discretionary spending and scaling back our social safety net. The votes are not there to do either. That leaves Obama scuffling to split the difference and sell it as a solution. He doesn’t have a choice, of course, because he has to do his best to govern a broken system.
I’m a little tired of listening to the left treat billions in Social Security IOU’s as somehow paid for, when the government long ago spent that money. It’s true that the U.S. government would have to default on its debt to not honor those IOU’s but they still have to raise the revenue to pay for them. When you have to raise revenue twice to pay the same debt, you have a problem. You especially have a problem when you can’t get Congress to raise a dime of new revenue through taxation. I agree it’s sickening to see “budget hawks” complain about the health of Social Security and treat the program as though it is itself the cause of our red ink. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t created a giant Social Security obligation that we don’t have the money to meet.
I’d prefer to see slogans like, “We spent your Social Security money to invade and occupy Iraq.” Or, “We spent your Social Security money so we could keep taxes low on the rich.” Because that’s what we’ve been doing. We may have been somewhat profligate in our domestic discretionary spending, but that only explains a tiny portion of our staggering debt. Here’s the problem:
Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found…
…Federal, state and local income taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
Our federal government has not gotten smaller, but our unwillingness to tax the affluent has never been greater. The Tea Party is an acronym for Taxed Enough Already. How ironic that this movement arose at a time of historically low taxation.
