Quote:
Originally Posted by VivaLFuego
Just playing devil's advocate here, but isn't this (i.e. borrowing from future hypothetical tax increases to pay for spending today without a present tax increase) just a form of pandering to anti-tax voters?
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Yes it is, which is a big reason why I am a libertarian and not a Republican (other reasons include the fact that Republicans pretty much want to kill everyone who isn't WASP except the Jews and don't like political freedom or free thought). Libertarians are for the reduction of the size of government then the reduction of taxes. Republicans are for the reduction of taxes and the reallocation of all government spending to the military-industrial complex regardless of whatever massive deficits it creates.
In other words, the if the government kept their filthy hands out of the transportation business by not massively subsidizing the construction of highways, the private mass transit companies that built the El and streetcars would never had gone broke. If they would never had gone broke, the government would never had an excuse to expand their power into the management and subsidization (though they suck at subsidizing it) of mass transit. So today we would still have an extremely dense urban center with less open lots, fewer cars, and nearly everyone taking the train or a street car (instead of buses) to work.
Essentially I believe the government gets involved somewhere it shouldn't, throws the natural balance of things out of whack, then uses that out-of-whackness as an excuse that "oh clearly the government needs to expand their power here" which only causes further problems that give them further excuses and so on. So what I am for is nipping that process in the bud and reducing the number of stupid things the government has taken over. Then, once the government saves money by not spending trillions on freeways then spending billions more a year subsidizing the transit they undercut with freeways, we reduce taxes because the surplus would be huge, not the other way around.
I don't have a problem with paying taxes for things like fire departments, reasonable national defense, education, and even health care (if they would just go all the way and make a system that mimics the competition between public and private universities). I have a huge problem with paying taxes to build freeways everywhere, invade random countries, and to line the pockets of bureaucrats. I also have a problem when the baby boomers, because they are demographically huge, rape and pillage the future of my generation by cutting taxes for themselves and then ramping up government spending through the roof and dumping the massive deficits on me for me to pay someday when I have a good job (assuming the boomers slash and burn of our country doesn't destroy all the jobs...).