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| In Europe the Fire This Time | The Senate Goes Wobbly |
If Republicans Don't Stand for Tax Cuts...
by Christopher Chantrill
November 15, 2005 at 3:28 am
IF THERE IS one thing the Republican Party stands for it is tax cuts. That is because it is Republicans who actually pay taxes. Over 95 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers.
So why then is Republican US Senator Olympia Snowe balking at the extension of the 15 percent dividend and capital gains taxes enacted in the great Bush tax cuats of 2003? Is it just grandstanding, or is she using the tax cut issue to push her pet project?
Republicans had better watch out, writes investment guru Larry Kudlow. Even if the Democrats insist on disrespecting the investor (and risk-taking) class in their eternal drumbeat about tax cuts for the rich, the investor class might want to teach Republicans a lesson if they don’t deliver on an investor-friendly tax regime.
Republicans may be alienating their most natural supporters. In recent elections, nearly two out of every three voters were stock owners. Where will they turn if the Republicans they put into office no longer represent them?
The problem for investors is that they really don’t have an alternative. Ever since the early 1980s the Democrats have set their face against the supply-side menu of low tax rates. They persist in a vision of the economy as an enlargement of the federal budget. You take money from the taxpayers to fund programs for Americans.
But that is not how the economy works. The economy is a world in which people make goods and services for other people in society so that they can get in exchange the things that they want: food, housing, transportation, health care. The results are in on how to make the economic system work better. You create a level playing field without hills of privilege and subsidy and the valleys of high tax rates and punitive regulation. The more you enact privileges and subsidies—the more that Congress does what comes naturally—the more you distort the relationship between producers and consumers, and the more you leach prosperity out of the system.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
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
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