The Reticulator

Is this a “mine is bigger than yours” contest?

Anxious to jolt the economy back to life, President-elect Barack Obama appears to be zeroing in on a stimulus package of about $850 billion, dwarfing last spring’s tax rebates and rivaling drastic government actions to fight the Great Depression.

If they want to play games, how about instead making it a “mine lasts longer than yours” contest? The way to do that is with permanent tax relief. Nobody is going to make long-term plans based on a short-term stimulus. In fact, this kind of wild stimulus behavior only adds to the uncertainty that is killing the economy now.

George Will informs us that Congress is casting a greedy eye on tax-free university endowments. (“Washington’s Willie Sutton Moment“) It wants more money to control, so it wants to control how these endowments are spent.

I agree with Will to some extent. We should never miss an opportunity to point out that corporate greed is mainly a problem of government greed (governments being our largest corporations).

But instead of just complaining, I wish Will would suggest something positive, like removing the tax-exempt status of university endowments. It would be a positive step toward creating a society in which there are no privileged classes – where we’re all in it together. When it comes time to discuss whether taxes should be raised, then all of those articulate people who are running our nation’s universities would have a stake in the issue, too. As it now stands, they always want more taxes to pay for more student loan programs, for research grants, for this program and for that. They are oblivious to the downside, of how their demands for money can destroy the tax base needed to support the institutions they run. Removing their tax-exempt status would motivate them to think harder about sustainability — about how we can sustain the economic engine that is needed to support our universities and make them even greater.

I haven’t heard much about Neil Boortz and his Fair Tax lately. But I was reminded of it when reading Chapter One of “The Whiskey Rebellion : Frontier epilogue to the American Revolution” by Thomas Slaughter (1986). I’m reading it in preparation for a bicycle tour later this summer.

Fair Tax proponents think a sales tax would be unobtrusive. But here is how one writer described the enforcement of a sales tax (known then as an excise tax) in 18th century Britain.

Excise, a monster worse than e’er before

Frighted the midwife, and the mother tore.

A thousand hands she has, a thousand eyes.

Breaks into shops, and into cellars pries;

With hundred rows of teeth the shark exceeds,

And on all trades, like Casawar, she feeds. . . .

She stalks all day in streets, conceal’d from sight,

And flies like bats with leathern wings by night;

She wastes the country, and on cities preys.

That’s the same title (exclamation mark included) that was on a mailing I received today from Noah T. Winer at moonbat.org.

It’s nice that they’re having fun.  I look forward to receiving similar missives with subject lines like

Toga party! or Food fight!