Other people's money

President Bush's proposed tax cut would wrest control from tax-and-spend Democrats and return power to the people.

By David Horowitz

Mar 5, 2001 | An indispensable guide to the great tax debate is the 200-year-old observation by a professor named Alexander Tyler. He warned: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury."

The Democratic Party is the party of this form of popular corruption. The heart of the Democratic Party and its activist core is made up of government unions, government-dependent professions (teachers, social workers, civil servants); special-interest and special-benefits groups (abortion rights is a good example) that feed off the government trough; and ethnic constituencies, African-Americans being the most prominent, that are disproportionately invested in government jobs and in programs that government provides. The Democratic Party credo is "take as much of the people's money as politically feasible, and use that money to buy as many of the people's votes as possible."

Tax cuts are a threat to this Democratic agenda. Consequently, Democrats loathe and despise them. During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton and Al Gore did propose a "tax cut for the middle class" -- a constituency they coveted. But once they were elected, they immediately reneged on the promise. In their first budget in 1993 they engineered the largest tax increase in American history with Gore, as vice president, casting the deciding Senate vote. Nor did they once support Republican-proposed tax cuts during the rest of their years in power.

The only reason a tax cut is on the table today, in the first flush of the new Bush administration, is because Alexander Tyler was overly cynical and unduly pessimistic. Over the last several decades, a party has arisen in American politics that is anti-big government and that, despite tacks and retreats, is committed to an agenda of reducing government's ability to reach into the peoples' pockets in pursuit of its insatiable greed. The modern Republican Party is the creation of Ronald Reagan, who dramatically reduced marginal tax rates in 1982, and Newt Gingrich, whose 1994 "Contract with America" imposed balanced budgets over determined Democratic resistance. (The balanced budget did have a crucial assist from the Master Opportunist, who in 1996 triangulated across party lines to save himself from electoral defeat, and who brought some of his party along with him.)

The adoption of a balanced budget in the context of a booming economy produced the gigantic government surpluses that have forced the question: What are we going to do with these trillion-dollar overcharges on American taxpayers? The Republican answer is: Return the money to the people who paid it. The Democratic answer: Don't.

Al Gore's proposal for "targeted tax cuts" during the 2000 presidential campaign was a concession to political reality perfectly reflecting the Democrats' dedication to the corruption of the popular will. Gore's plan targeted voting constituencies that the Democrats coveted (e.g., tax credits for the middle class for college tuition), and rewarded those who adopted their political preferences (purchasers of environmentally friendly automobiles, for example). In contrast, his Republican opponent, George W. Bush, promised an across-the-board tax refund that would "return the money to those who paid it." Bush proposed returning more than three times the tax overcharge that Gore was willing to part with.

Now President Bush is attempting to make good on his campaign promise with a $1.6 trillion tax relief. And the Democrats are still trying to stop him. The president's tax refund, they say, is a plan to "give" every rich person a Lexus, and every poor person a kick when they're down. It is a massive "redistribution of wealth to the wealthy." It is a "tax break for the rich." But these are all demagogic lies. When you return money, you do not "give" it or "redistribute" it. You return it. It's that simple.

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