Fifty Percent Tax Bracket Failing to Boost Tax Revenues

The Telegraph reports that Britain's new higher taxes on the rich aren't producing any revenue for the government.  It appears that people are changing their behavior to avoid the levy.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

Not only did revenues to the UK Treasury not go up.  They went down by £509 million, or roughly 5%.

The dynamics of human aversion to punishment as it relates to tax policy are well explained and documented by Arthur Laffer, et al in "The End of Prosperity" (2008).  His ideas are summarized in my post "How to Fight Black Unemployment" (9/13/11).

There's a lesson here about tax policy and populist demagoguery, one that the White House and the national media will studiously avoid learning or disseminating.  That doesn't mean that We the people are obliged to bury our heads in the sand and follow their lead.

The Heartland Tax Rebellion

The Journal editorializes on the growing phenomenon of states repealing their income taxes, which is putting pressure on governors like Oklahoma's Mary Fallin, whose neighbors are beating her state to the punch.

The tax competition in America's heartland is an encouraging sign that at least some U.S. politicians understand that they can't take prosperity for granted. It must be nurtured with good policy, as they compete for jobs and investment with other states and the rest of the world.

The following table depicts some fairly harsh realities for little Statists.

The tax burden isn't the only factor that determines investment flows and growth. But it is a major signal about how a state treats business, investment and risk-taking. States like New York, California, Illinois and Maryland that have high and rising tax rates also tend to be those that have growing welfare states, heavy regulation, dominant public unions, and budgets that are subject to boom and bust because they rely so heavily on a relatively few rich taxpayers.

California, Illinois, New York, Maryland--and let's not forget Ohio: Prop 2 to you, too.  Aren't those the states waiting hat-in-hand for another federal bailout to prop up their utopian public schemes?

President Obama's ill-fated "stimulus" of 2009 (and proposed "jobs" bill of 2011)was little more than a bailout of little Statists by the big Statist.  It was a redistribution of money from responsible red state taxpayers to irresponsible blue states governments--despite the fact that many red-state taxpayers fled blue states in order to escape their former laboratories of democracy.

Let the big blue states try to tax themselves out of their problems.  Neither the problem nor the solution--Wisconsin's solution at the spending level, and the states' listed in the table above at the tax level--are the federal government's province.

The Age of Kardashian

The ubiquitous Kim Kardishian is in the news for apparently no longer being newsworthy.

Everything the reality family touches turns absolutely toxic — with party promoters, magazine editors and television execs all scrambling to blacklist them, insiders told The Post. 

Ratings for the family’s reality show have plummeted, sales of magazines with Kim Kardashian’s mug go unsold, and her products are unmarketable, insiders say.

The writer opines that her fall from grace stems from her publicity-stunt marriage to New Jersey Net's forward Kris Humphries, which afforded those who consume celebrity objects only 72 days of vicarious thrills.  The disappointment was simply too much to bear for a public expecting years of virtual wedded bliss in Kim's nuptial bed.  

In consequence, her stock price is cratering.  Noman wonders, however, if there isn't another explanation for this newsless piece of information.  

Last month, William McGurn penned a routinely masterful opinion piece entitled "Taxing Kim Kardashian."

It's not her split from Mr. Humphries only 72 days after their wedding, which raised questions about whether the marriage was simply one big publicity stunt. Nor was it the earlier sex tape that earned her celebrity and riches. Only a prude would object to that. 

No, Ms. Kardashian's sin is this: She pays what she owes in state taxes under California law, instead of the much larger amount that some self-appointed advocacy group thinks she ought to be paying.

The organization is called Courage Campaign and its website reveals it to be a California mélange of activist groups and labor unions. In a video that presents Ms. Kardashian in some of her more conspicuously consumptive moments, Courage Campaign claims that while Ms. Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, she paid only one percentage point more in taxes (10.3%) than a middle-class Californian (9.3%). 

"That's not OK," says Campaign Courage. And in their video, they get right to the point, calling on viewers to "Ask Kim to support the millionaires tax of 2012." 

Ms. Kardashian has become wealthier than a Pharaoh by encouraging the public to lust for her.  And while the public is only too willing to engage in this contemporary form of everyday idolatry, the Left sees depravity only in her greed manifest by her not paying more in taxes.

It doesn't see enough.  Greed is of a piece; it is the glue sealing the bargain between consumers who shower human objects with loot in return for absorbing every last detail of their fleshy lives, and the commodified celebrities who court the bargain to their own detriment.  (Ask Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.)  

If more people read Aquinas, they would know of the intimate connection between lust and greed, both of which are capital vices.  Both inflame human passions and overwhelm practical reason--deliberation, judgment and choice.  

Prudence flees, conscience is occluded, where lust and/or greed take root.  Consequently, neither lust nor greed are sins that a rational culture encourages to fester, let alone nurtures, in its bosom.

Where you find glossy magazine covers and video screens filled with images of relatively talentless women strutting about as lusty confections to be consumed--like bon-bons on high heels--you necessarily find lust.  

Conversely, you won't necessarily find greed wherever you find wealth--a condition that need not automatically lead to conspicuous consumption.

Ironically, the Left decries wealth, while it forces pornography and sexual corruption onto the culture, and thus onto everyone, under the guise of a right.  The fact that people like Kim Karadashian dominate the public's notice has everything to do with the Left's appropriation of media and legal culture.

With respect to tax lust:  

It's tempting to dismiss this campaign as the work of a bunch of California crazies. The problem is that its assumptions about wealth and taxes extend far beyond the Golden State. Indeed, they have calcified into an orthodoxy that defines the Democratic Party.  

[Believers] will not be swayed because they are not being driven by their economics. They are being driven by their conception of immorality: the idea that millionaires have more than they should—and that any wealth they have is not something they have earned but something the state has allowed them to keep. 

It says much about the progressive Puritanism of our age that what these folks really find most sleazy about Ms. Kardashian is not her sex tape or her marriage, but that she's unembarrassed about making money. 

Many years ago in these pages, Irving Kristol famously wrote that the liberal paradigm "has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie—but only if she is paid the minimum wage." Today, women like Ms. Kardashian make much more money exercising that right. The only question progressives ask is about the size of the government's cut.

A Journal reader in Massachusetts retorts:

If every American had ready access to the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter and health care—no one would justly begrudge a millionaire as rich as Croesus. 

But in reality, thousands of sick, poor and disabled Americans lack such basic sustenance, while a tiny fraction of the population possesses most of the nation's wealth. That, Mr. McGurn, is what is morally repugnant to the liberal conscience.

Noman's conservative conscience also recoils at the specter of thousands of Americans, and millions of people around the world, lacking ready access to the basic necessities of life.  He scoffs, however, at the risible suggestion that increasing taxes in order to pay off Democratic constituencies for their fealty will do one whit to resolve this problem.

If providing succor to the poor, and not Statism, were the true motive of Liberal belief and action, then they would join with Conservatives in cause to strengthen families (procreative ones) and churches.  These institutions protect and fortify the person with love, care and material sustenance necessary to develop habits of self-sufficiency, become sensitized in a practical manner to the needs of others, avoid poverty in the first place, and recover should they fall into it.  

Yet, Liberals routinely attack family and church, arrogate their roles, and enlarge the State's dominion through programs to address the problems created by their intentional diminution.

Liberals would join with conservatives to deter, rather than foment, addictions to sex, drugs and rock & roll--addictions that reduce far too many to a feeble crust, a pathetic semblance of a person.

This genuine solicitude for the poor, for human dignity, would promptly end the political conflicts that roil the nation and prevent its unified advance towards the common good.  Liberals don't want to end the cultural degradation, however, which results in the very poverty they brandish as exhibit A in their hall of self-justification.  

If there were no poor, beholding or dependent, what excuse would Liberals have for raising taxes and creating a massive state that operates according to the rules of patronage rather than the inhospitable ones of performance?  Who would vote for them?  

There is a reason people quip that Liberals love the poor so much that they strive to create more of them.

Finally, Liberals would join cause with Conservatives to strengthen the capitalist system (as opposed to ideology), which produces wealth and provides opportunity for more people to achieve higher standards of living than have ever before been deemed possible.  

They would acknowledge that for the sake of combatting poverty-inducing addictions, not everything should be marketable, e.g., pornography, sex, drugs.  They would desist in proposing high-tax, low-freedom solutions that perpetuate the problems that ostensibly motivate Liberal compassion.

Noman is weary of figments like Kim Kardashian who are thrust onto his consciousness to separate him from his conscience, wits and money.  The endless parade of celebrity vixens served up for public consumption sadly reminds him that consumers and consumed alike are fallen.  

OK, the woman looks good.  Beyond that, is there any other reason to notice her, let alone incessantly?

If McGurn is right, then her toxicity problem can easily be solved.  All she needs is to be photographed and make appearances with Warren Buffet on behalf of higher taxes.  

She can praise the virtues of government compassion, and perhaps adopt a PC cause, like Mark Zuckerberg did with the paradigmatic government boondoggle: Newark's notoriously troubled public schools.  That was sufficient to deflect concerns over Facebook's systemic disregard of privacy concerns.

NGO activists would stop conspiring with media activists and the nasty articles would stop.  If today's goddess of gloss genuflected obeisantly enough to the political correctness that makes and breaks her, she might even get glowing coverage for her humanitarianism.

Aside from her temporary problems, however, people and society should be concerned about the never ending media barrage clutching at the human soul from the grocery store line to one's living room.  

“I’m bored with them,” said Manhattan publicist R. Couri Hay, who organized paid Kardashian visits to clubs in 2008 and 2010. Now, he said, he wouldn’t dream of promoting “Kim Kardashian and her little clunky sisters.”

Noman is bored with them, too.  And, he's never even seen their (or any) TV reality show.  He knows too much about the observer effect, and seen to many women strut their stuff for a spontaneous audience, to think that such a thing is possible. 

Saint Buffet's Chutzpah

'I'll donate a dollar to pay down the deficit for every dollar that Congressional Republicans donate' taunts Warren Buffet in a Reuters article (n.b. indirect quote).

He must have finished President Obama's copy of "Rules for Radicals" and decided to get on the fun side--the media's side--of the Statist v. Liberty conflict.  Annoying your enemy, especially to the delight of Alinsky's realistic revolutionaries, is a winning tactic according to the handbook for community organizers.

The irony of the quintessential "Have" speaking in the name of the "Have Nots" to persuade the "Have Some, Want Mores" to play in a game that gives him, not them, yet more is rich.

This "Have Some, Wants More" isn't fooled.

In return for his advocacy of Statist governance, Buffet gets the President's private assurances that BankAmerica, for instance, won't be allowed to go bankrupt, and that it is safe for him to invest billions of dollars in it on buccaneer terms.

The person who said that higher risk was necessary to earn higher returns didn't understand crony capitalism.

If Warren Buffet wants to squander the prestige he earned as a capitalist on behalf of Statist politics and governance, that's his business.  We the people are free to ignore him, as we surely must do if only for the sake of self-preservation and that of the our country.

There were a couple of passages in the article, however, that begged a rejoinder.

The jabs over voluntary payments come as higher taxes for the wealthy and extension of payroll tax breaks for middle-class Americans are becoming increasingly contentious issues for the 2012 presidential race. Obama is trying to paint Republicans as only favoring the wealthy, while Republicans are trying to brand the president as relying on tax hikes to fund excessive spending.

While it is certainly the case that each Party is jockeying to paint the other in the least favorable light, someone should point out that the picture Republicans are painting accords with a plausible reading of reality, whereas the one that Democrats are painting does not.

Borrowing a line from the immortal Josh Steiner, Republicans' claims are more a Manet than a Monet; Democrats'  are much more a Munch--they say more about the painter's state of mind than about what they depict.

First, the President's claims that Republicans favor only the wealthy, are pure bloviation.

Unlike Warren Buffet, George Soros, Jon Corzine, Jeff Immelt, George Kaiser and the cadre of deep-pocket donors from Wall Street to Sunset Blvd. that fill the President's war chest to overflowing, Noman is not wealthy.

He knows that what passes for government since Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi took over Congress in 2006, and especially since Barack Obama took over the White House in 2008, favors neither the middle class, no-family nor him.

To benefit from Democrats' favor, one must know somebody rather than something useful, have pressure group connections, join the metastasizing public sector, or generally be willing to lay down, roll over and beg.

Democrats' economic initiatives hinder the nation.  Republicans' initiatives to reduce the scale and scope of government, taxes and regulation help the middle class and Noman by stimulating rather than suffocating private initiative, thereby unleashing rather than shackling the economy.

Republicans' economic initiatives promise hope for those skillful, lucky and blessed enough to seize opportunity.  Democrats promise effortless abundance that exists nowhere but in heaven and in utopian fantasies.

Noman prefers freedom--even if it means the possibility of failure--to servitude and a life dependent upon whom one knows rather than upon what.

On the other hand, the President is relying on tax hikes to fund excessive spending.  He fights like a rabid wolverine--a low-biting one at that--to defend every ounce of pork and patronage in the budget.  He snarls and growls for tax increases through the use of euphemisms like "fairness."

Then he has the audacity to lambast Republicans for not compromising.

Total national debt has levitated by 60%, to over $16 trillion, during his Presidency despite the government's receipt of $2.1 trillion in tax revenues each and every year of it.  How much is enough?

While current annual taxes slightly exceed 2005's amount, today's deficit surpasses that year's by $1.3 trillion. The difference is big government's spending of $3.8 trillion. The facts are plain to see.

That would constitute excessive spending in most people's estimation.  But, for Liberals, the Goldilocks standard applies.  Whatever the amount spent, as long as it increases year-to-year by a higher rate, it is never excessive and always just right (barely).

But, not for baby bear, whose belongings are casually appropriated by somebody else.

Before President Obama arrived in the White House with his notion of fairness, the federal government never spent more than $3 trillion in a single year.  Thanks to his exertions, it will never again spend less, and is projected to spend $4 trillion by 2015.

Any bets on the actual figure reaching $5 trillion as ObamaCare bureaucrats settle into their offices?

Which Party is painting a realistic picture, and which is just doodling?  You be the judge, in November.

The second point regards Saint Buffet's social theory, specifically his confusion of government with society.

Buffett said in the Time interview the United States needed a tax system that favored people who were not born investors. 

"We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system, and to capitalism, but are nevertheless just as good citizens, and are doing things that are of use in society," he said.

Noman begs to differ.  We need strong intermediate associations--e.g., family, church, schools; in short, educational, religious, cultural, charitable and other organizations--not a tax system that robs these associations to favor pet groups, and recycle money with strings attached.

In a revealing moment of the New Hampshire debate last Saturday night, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney explained how this operates for good citizens doing useful things for society.

For instance, the Catholic Church was forced to abandon its role as a provider of adoptions in the state of Massachusetts because of its unwillingness to genuflect before Liberals' sexual dogma.  For refusing to serve Baal, Catholic Charities has been denied millions of dollars in federal funding used to help victims of sex trafficking.

Why is this money in the governments' hands to begin with so that it can meddle with the religious beliefs of Catholics, and others?

Buffet apparently doesn't realize that the agency of government is not the only means to assist people that aren't as well adapted to the market system and capitalism as he is.

Yet, he uses his celebrity to debilitate the very system in which he honorably earned it.  By doing so he exposes his ingratitude, as well as ignorance of political economy and life in the middle class--as opposed to among those who deign from the heights to speak for it.

Then again, the government doesn't work as well for most people as it does for him.  He's in a select club of cronies, membership in which makes it worth his while to shill for Statists.

Noman prefers a less contrived game: one in which he and his no-children are free to become the next Warren Buffet, and in which the living legend doesn't labor to ensure that everybody stays in his or her place.

Class Warfare and the Buffett Rule

Noman was delighted to find an Arthur Laffer opinion piece in this morning's paper.  In it, he argues that a millionaire surtax would hurt everyone but the super rich like Warren Buffet.  Noman imagines that Buffet knows this, which is why he feels safe in being so bold as to champion the notion.

Waving Mr. Buffett's op-ed for all to see, Mr. Obama wasted no time in proposing a surtax on millionaires called the "Buffett Rule." Putting aside all the oohing and ahhing over Mr. Buffett's selflessness, his effective tax rate on his true income would hardly budge if this "Buffett Rule" were applied.

Mr. Buffett's net worth rose by $10 billion in 2010 to $47 billion, according to Forbes Magazine. That increase, an unrealized capital gain, is part of his total income by any standard definition, including the one used by the Congressional Budget Office. After also including a $1.6 billion gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Buffett's true income in 2010 was much closer to $11.6 billion than the $40 million figure cited in his op-ed. Hence his true effective tax rate was only 6/100ths of 1% as opposed to 17.4%. And these are just the additions to his income that we know about.

That untaxed $11.2 billion of income would still not be touched by the Buffett Rule, after application of which his taxes would increase by $7 million. His effective tax rate would rise to .12% from .06%.

Zowie!  Meanwhile, the rest of us would have our growth ceiling, and probability of reaching it, lowered.

One might argue that Buffet's paltry tax relative to his true income only underscores his point, which is that he doesn't pay enough.  But, the real point is that under his own proposal, he still wouldn't.  The rest of us, on the other hand, would have to endure higher rates, higher taxes, a less prosperous economy, fewer routes to upward mobility, and the ignonimy of having to laud Buffet's selflessness.

After laying Mr. Buffet's pretensions to waste, Laffer targets his hypocrisy.

Mr. Buffett's donation to the Gates Foundation goes to the heart of my critique of his public call for higher tax rates on the rich...  [I]f his gift weren't tax sheltered he wouldn't give it. So much for "shared sacrifice."

In a 2007 CNBC interview, when asked why he shelters his money through tax-free strategies rather than writing big checks to Uncle Sam, Mr. Buffett responded: "I think that on balance the Gates Foundation, my daughter's foundation, my two sons' foundations will do a better job with lower administrative costs and better selection of beneficiaries than the government." 

So Mr. Buffett thinks he and his family can put their money to better use than the government can. I guess he's really not so different from the rest of us after all.

That article of clothing lying about your ankles, Mr. Buffet, is your pants.  Whatever was once holding them up has been plucked off.

Laffer is the foremost advocate of the well-documented and statistically-verified policy argument that if you want the rich to pay more taxes in both absolute and relative terms, then the high end of marginal tax rates should be lowered, not raised.

When it comes to raising tax revenues by raising tax rates on the rich, Mr. Buffett would again appear to be on the wrong side of the argument. Between 1921 and 1928, the top marginal income tax rate fell to 25% from 73%. During this period, tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners rose to 1.1% of GDP from 0.6% of GDP. The top income tax rate dropped to 70% from 91% after the Kennedy tax cuts began in 1964, while tax receipts from the top 1% of earners rose to 1.9% of GDP from 1.3% of GDP in the period 1960 to 1968. By the way, these periods were two of the biggest booms in U.S. history. 

Guess what was the third period of boom? Since 1978, the top earned income tax rate fell to 35% from 50%, the top capital gains tax rate fell to 15% from 39.9%, and the highest dividend tax rate fell to 15% from 70%. After taking office in 1993, President Clinton virtually eliminated the capital gains tax from the sale of owner-occupied homes and cut government spending as a share of GDP by the largest amount ever. 

Meanwhile, the top 1% of earners saw their tax payments climb to 3.3% of GDP in 2007 from 1.5% of GDP in 1978, while the bottom 95% saw their tax payments drop to 3.2% of GDP in 2007 from 5.4% of GDP in 1978. Why would Mr. Buffett want to reverse these numbers? 

Laffer's facts are tough to argue with.  But, that doesn't prevent Statists from trying.

Of course, cynics and die-hard progressives might object to the above evidence on the grounds that it was driven by an explosion of income gains. But that's largely the point.

The evidence suggests that big government Lefties' real attraction to higher taxes is that they leave the vast majority of people worse off, not better.  Widespread poverty, not increased receipts to the government, appears to be the true aim of the "fair share" set.  Anything to reduce the sphere of private decision-making, and increase the dominion of centralized power, eh?

And, that's just fine with Warren Buffet.  He'll cut his own deal with whatever hegemon needs to be placated.

Noman has written about Laffer, and Buffet, and encourages you read the former's "The End of Prosperity" (2008).  It sheds a great deal of light on class warfare as an economic stratagem, and makes one question the morals of those who foment it as a political one.

Corporate Carve-Out Revolt

What is a Democratic Governor like Pat Quinn in a pork barrel blue state like Illinois to do?  

The Party's power depends upon an endless stream of government jobs with budget-busting benefits, which translates into votes.  Unfortunately, the game only works if the bill can be foisted onto a deep-pocket third party.  The fly in the ointment is those unreasonable, right-wing tax payers, who are tired of being played for a pocket.

The Democrats' preferred solution is to sew up acquiescence and hamstring resistance by invoking fairness, responsibility, family or what-have-you.  The answer is never to cut the size and scope of government, or the ever-growing class of government union employees.

As today's WSJ explains, a stickier problem is antsy corporations, which have other options than to stay and be fleeced, while being hated.  How to solve the problem created by the prior solution of higher taxes?  By granting exemptions from the hikes to entities powerful enough to lobby politicians effectively for them (n.b. think ObamaCare waivers).

In January, the Democratic legislature and Governor Pat Quinn approved a 67% increase in the state's income tax and another increase in the corporate tax that gives the Land of Lincoln the highest business taxes in the Midwest. The Chicago Merc [Mercantile Exchange], a major presence in the downtown "Loop" with 2,000 employees, says the tax increase is costing it $50 million this year. 

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who has quipped that he feels like he is "living next door to the Simpsons," has already persuaded more than a dozen Illinois companies to relocate to the more business-friendly Hoosier State... Indiana is making a big play to lure the Merc to Indianapolis from Chicago, the company's home for more than 100 years. 

To keep this corporate out-migration from becoming a stampede, Mr. Quinn has been handing out sweetheart tax waivers to major employers. As we reported on June 9 ("Illinois Tax Firesale"), Governor Quinn has already offered or doled out more than $200 million this year to induce big companies like Motorola Mobility to stay in Illinois. But the spontaneous citizen combustion in recent weeks suggests that Illinois voters are losing patience with carve-outs for the politically powerful.

Darn that Occupy Wall Street movement for fomenting resentment of big corporations even while ignoring this aspect of preferential treatment. Corporations enjoy prerogatives from government in return for maintaining silence and inaction while government fleeces the middle class.

The Journal notes the wastefulness, not to mention wrong-headedness, of this never-ending cycle of fixes-to-fixes to problems that are rooted, in the final analysis, in an over-bloated public sector.

The better policy would be for the Governor and legislature to admit their blunder and repeal the tax increase on all companies, large and small. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, a free-market research shop, the cost of repealing the Quinn corporate tax increase would be less over 15 years than the cost of the new tax carve-outs. The main reason for Springfield's chronic deficits is excessive pension and health benefits to public employee unions. 

Meanwhile, taxes are killing jobs. In another study, the Illinois Policy Institute finds that Illinois was enjoying a jobs recovery until the tax hike passed this year. Then the job numbers headed south in a hurry, and payrolls shrunk by 89,000 in the six months following the revenue grab. The Illinois jobless rate is 10.1%, well above the 8.6% national rate. 

Noman has written before about Illinois' problems and Governor Quinn's stewardship of the state's finances (See "The Plan," March 18, 2011).  He wonders if voters will ever wake up and rid themselves of the mindset, and Party, that is draining that state of its vitality.  As the Journal puts it:

Democratic colleagues pretended that their midnight tax hike in January wouldn't injure the state's economy. 

This is what tax increasers always say. Nearly every day they are being proven wrong, and we hope the citizens who helped to bring down the special-interest tax bill two weeks ago remember who put the state in this fix in the first place.

 Amen to that.  It is worth remembering that the problem of corporate welfare doesn't begin with corporations.  Rather, it begins with pork barrel public spending, political patronage, high sounding oratory about fairness, and more burdensome taxes that later necessitate bribing job providers to stay put.

Liberal Tax Dodgers and the Disrespected Sushi Chef

Noman has mentioned David Mamet frequently in his posts since reading and being deeply impressed by his soul searching political apologia entitled "The Secret Knowledge."

It is a special book filled with insights about the Left, the Right, government, culture, ethnicity and more.

He penned a thoughtful and funny, even if a bit disjointed, Op-ed in the other day's WSJ.

For, the more I think about it, the more the question of taxes is central to that of liberty in general. For the question is: Who is to run the country? Is it to be run by its citizens, free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit, or by the government, increasing both its powers and its corruption by the ability to tax? 

And who would be these Solons who would run our government, but the good-willed and otherwise unemployable, content to suck at the government tit, and spout trash for a living—e.g., that one may disrespect an absent sushi chef by an incorrect method of eating his California roll, or that a proportion of races in the workplace differing from the proportion of races in the populace at large is de facto evidence of discrimination? 

Cut taxes and these intellectual wards of the state will have to find a method of support that actually fulfills a need. Cut taxes and the "special interests" will have no incentive to bribe or "support" a candidate to the tune of a fortune, for the candidate, if elected, will have no ability to repay the bribe.

It is at least facially plausible that government from the municipal to the federal level is filled with attitude-challenged unemployables.

That is the way it seems whenever Noman has to interface with the property tax assessor or building inspector, the department of motor vehicles or secretary of state, the IRS or airport transport workers.

Higher salaries, better perks, greater job security and an enhanced ability to exert power over others than readily available in comparable private sector positions seem to have worsened the problem rather than rectified it.

Manet's prescriptions sound good to Noman.  Cut taxes; reduce the demands of government upon the nation's pocketbook; shake free of government funded concentrations of Liberal power and pieties.

To borrow a phrase, we have nothing to lose but our chains.  Let the shredding begin.