Marc Thiessen: The Country Voted For Big Government. Now It's Time They Paid For It -- Let Taxes Go Up on the Middle Class.

I have this thought a lot -- deficit spending allows a lot of hiding of the true cost of Obama's mega-government. Those who'll pay for it aren't conscious of that. Either they're not of voting age yet, or -- this is the bigger category -- they are of voting age, and just don't realize that in four or five years the tab they're running up comes due, in one way or another.

So maybe we should be deficit hawks first, prioritizing that over tax-cutters. If the public votes for big government, they at least should be required to understand the cost of it all.

How can we expect people to care about the growth of government if it doesn’t cost them anything?

Instead of paying for the current miasma of spending, we’ve been borrowing the money from our children and grandchildren. The national debt has grown by nearly $6 trillion in the four years since Obama took office. That generational theft cannot continue. We must not keep financing big government by passing the bills on to the next generation. Ideally, we would stop the spending binge and live within our means. But if the nation is not up to that, then we should all pitch in and pay for it — all of us.

Sorry, taxing the rich won’t solve our problems — that’s nothing but fiscal snake oil the president has been selling. He is demanding $1.3 trillion in higher taxes on the wealthy over 10 years. Imagine he got it. We are adding nearly that much to the national debt every single year. Taxing the rich would not put even a minor dent in our debt. It would pay for less than three weeks of federal spending every year. The only way to pay for the current expansion of government is to raise taxes on the middle class.

So let’s do it. Let’s all of us experience the true cost of big government in the form of a bigger tax bill.

He argues that it was a strategic mistake for Republicans to force Obama to extend the Bush tax cuts -- they were the only thing keeping the economy from going into another nosedive, due to his policy choices, and they're popular. Obama got the benefit of them while continuing to argue against them and blame everything on Bush.

posted by Ace at 01:38 PM

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