Freedom from Taxes

Loopholes: Another Word for Freedom por Jeffrey Tucker:

Both parties are pushing for some kind of tax reform, but the key rule is “revenue neutrality.” All these plans are doped out with the presumption that the planners can perfectly anticipate future revenue, but the regime change has no effect whatsoever on people’s behavior in the marketplace.

Every tax reform in my lifetime has actually been a push for higher taxes in one form or another. And there are still other ways to raise taxes besides raising taxes, reducing deductions, capping deductions, and closing loopholes. You can raise tariffs, increase user fees, enact quotas, inflate the money supply, or outright confiscate people’s property through police state tactics. All these methods suck resources from the private economy into the government.

The goal of every tax reform is to do this in the sneakiest way possible.

.. The core problem is spending. If the government didn’t spend money, it wouldn’t need to tax anyone. The only real way to lower taxes over the long run is to cut spending, but again, this is not going to happen. Even those who talk about spending cuts are really talking about cutting the rate of increase in spending over five or 10 years in budget projections that have never panned out even one time in the history of the universe.

.. It’s long past time that people stop believing these thieves, much less trusting their motives.