Thank You Mr President - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU HAVEN´T completely surrendered to the Plame Game, you´ll know that the feds just lowered their deficit estimate for this year by $94 billion to $333 billion. Why did this happen? There were several one-time-only factors, but the big reason is that non-payroll deduction tax collections have soared this year. In other words, businesses and individuals are racking up higher profits and capital gains and the federal government is collecting its share.

We conservatives know why this is happening. In 2003 the Congress passed the President´s program to lower income tax rates and sharply lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains. The economy immediately kicked into high gear and it hasn´t looked back since, even with sharply higher energy prices. This effect is called supply-side economics and it works every time it is tried.

Let us give thanks where it is due, to President Bush for pushing through the tax cut plan in the face of implacable opposition from the Democrats.

We cannot know what would have happened to the economy if Vice-President Al Gore had been elected in November 2000, but we can guess. The policies he would have chosen would have looked a lot more like the macroeconomic policies of Old Europe, France and Germany. That means a swollen public sector, high tax rates, high unemployment and very little economic growth. Thank you Mr. President for sparing us from all of that.

Back in November 2000 we could not know whether the market crash of 2000 was another 1929 or not. But we know now that it didn´t end up that way. And the best way to evaluate why we didn´t have a Great Depression is to look at the mistakes the government made in the years after 1929 and didn´t make after 2000. It didn´t bail out lots of insolvent businesses. It didn´t enact a National Recovery Act to keep wages and prices above the market. It didn´t allow banks to collapse and shrink the money supply. It didn´t pass a swingeing Smoot Hawley tariff increase although it did pass a foolish tariff on steel imports. And it didn´t raise income tax rates like Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt did.

We cannot know what a President Gore would have done, but we can guess.

Like I said, thank you Mr. President.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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