This was recently post over at The Corner (maintained by National Review Online):
Cutting Taxes Is Critical [Victor Davis Hanson]
The candidates haven’t had much discussion about why they should cut taxes as much as possible.
The Bush tax cuts created more, not less, revenue. They were slurred only because spending during the first term vastly outpaced the rate of inflation — in part due to the wars, the dislocations from 9/11, and new entitlements (e.g., prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, etc) that led to rising deficits. Tax cuts have to be coupled with either spending restraint or cuts, or the additional revenue gained is forgotten when sums far vaster are spent.
Here in California we are back to the mega-deficits of 2003, largely as a result of out-of-control spending. Rarely do the conservative candidates explain why we should all be against tax increases, which are tell-tale signs that something has gone vastly wrong in our civilization. Fixed sales or income rates that were fine in the 1950s or 1960s should provide enough revenue as population increases, the economy grows, and more taxpayers make more money and thus pay more taxes. But when the rates climb it is also an indication of either mismanagement or a radically redefined view of expansive government that is now asked to take on responsibilities never before envisioned — or usually both.
One small example: The CSU and UC systems of university education in California are constantly complaining that they are broke, even though tax rates of almost all sorts, or “fees” have climbed in the last 15 years, and the state has collected record amounts of revenue. It is easy to see why the appetite is never satiated, when an average campus now has “Centers” for almost anything under the sun — from reading remediation, to women’s health problems, to migrant education, to disability centers, to day-care, to psychiatric counseling, to minority affairs, and on and on.
In the old days, most of what these programs — usually each has a professor in charge with release time, secretaries, an office, and a non-professorial manager — now claim to address either fell under class-time instruction (learn how to read well in an English class), private conversation (a professor might advise a student during office hours), or were the purview of the individual (plan with your family for baby-sitting). But as the university absorbed these chores, it, of course, was chronically broke, and the consumer of its new services was not thankful, but constantly agitating for even more to meet an expanding appetite and sense of entitlement.
With budgets under stress, administrators usually understood two things: (1) The public could care less whether the center for migrant education was cut, but it did care far more when Russian languages or engineering classes were dropped. Thus the latter are more likely to be threatened with extinction to scare the taxpayer; (2) the constituency for these therapeutic centers and studies programs are highly political in a way a Russian professor or an engineer is not, and thus administrators don’t touch them, since it is a lose/lose situation.
All this is a long way of saying that once income or sales taxes are continually raised it is a referendum on society as a whole that goes way beyond the incentive-killing effect of higher taxes. We turn over our individualism and autonomy to a professional drone class of managers who are usually without audit and counterproductive in almost everything they touch.