I really despise the cynical argument that any new tax revenues will simply be wasted and that government can't be trusted to do
anything productive.
This ideology is the product of decades of ratcheting by right-wing think tanks to essentially brainwash people into thinking that government is the least competent institution known to man. Most of the time these claims and arguments are made up with very little to no actual data, analysis and evidence.
I'm not some marxist that thinks government will solve all our problems. But to be able to confidently say in this thread when the government has a $7 billion dollar hole blown in its budget by relying on oil and gas revenues that compensating for that revenue with a sales tax will simply mean that all that money is wasted is basically the depth of cynicism and stupidity frankly.
These people then go on to complain about the state of service about all the government provisioned services that they're used to consuming without any reflective thought that those are a) services that are being paid for by taxes and b) that this view is often directly responsible for most of their complaints. They also seem to live in an alternate reality, where huge swaths of people don't actually use and need government services, that somehow we can just magically cut 25% out of the budget and that that would be a 'good' thing.
Krugman basically hits one out of the freaking park on these types of people, many of whom post in this thread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/op...etType=opinion
Quote:
On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t support their position.
The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?
Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest. If you don’t want the government to impose controls or fees on polluters, you want to deny that there is any reason to limit emissions. If you don’t want the combination of regulation, mandates and subsidies that is needed to extend coverage to the uninsured, you want to deny that expanding coverage is even possible. And claims about the magical powers of tax cuts are often little more than a mask for the real agenda of crippling government by starving it of revenue.
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