Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
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quarterback
ScottC
yellojktFrom an unexpected source, National Review Online, there is a take-down of the talking point about how “47 percent of Americans don’t pay [income] tax”.
Ramesh Ponnuru in his article “The Freeloader Myth” dismisses many of the misconceptions about the number of people who don’t pay income tax, in particular that the statistic ignores payroll taxes which for many Americans are a bigger burden than income taxes.
Federal taxes are still “progressive” — higher earners pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes — but the Tax Policy Center estimates that only about 18 percent of filers pay neither income nor payroll tax.
Ponnuru explains that the separation of income and payroll taxes is a false one often propagated for political purposes by both sides.
Many conservatives argue that since payroll taxes are dedicated to Medicare and Social Security, people who pay only payroll taxes are contributing to their retirements but not to the general operations of the government. The irony here is that FDR deliberately and explicitly introduced the payroll tax to accompany Social Security because it would encourage people to draw this false connection.
This hits on one of my favorite hot buttons. Money is fungible. A dollar sent to the government is a dollar sent to government no matter what its intended purpose. Even when it is earmarked or lock-boxed or whatever, those are just accounting fictions and it all goes into and out of the same big pool.
And here is the crux:
Count both the payroll and income tax and there is no trend toward lighter federal taxes on the lower-middle class.
He also addresses the implicit free-rider fear that somehow getting something for nothing drives poor voters into the hands of tax-and-spend liberals.
In one respect, the fixation on the number of people paying income tax is absurdly optimistic. Conservatives who worry about the political implications of this number are assuming that people who pay no income tax will conclude that expansions of government serve their material interests and vote accordingly. {snip} Under those circumstances merely requiring everyone to pay some amount in income taxes would change nothing. Any welfare state will have a large number of net beneficiaries. In a welfare state that runs routine, large deficits, almost everyone may be among them.
So is the answer to get more people with skin in the game? Not according to Ponnuru:
To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse.
The phrase ‘compassionate conservativism’ has been permanantly sullied by its inventor, but balancing the finances of our country on the backs of the poor is not something to be wished for.
Filed under: Uncategorized |
All Things in Moderation 
"The irony here is that FDR deliberately and explicitly introduced the payroll tax to accompany Social Security because it would encourage people to draw this false connection."This can't be said enough.
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I thought Rob Mosbacher Jr. the Houston oilman and philanthropist invented "Compassionate Conservatism" in the 90s. BTW, he meant it.GWB just borrowed the phrase with permission, b/c Rob thought GWB meant it, too. Which he probably did at the beginning of his first term.Yes, the fiction FDR created has made [most of] us claim an ownership of SS that we do not assert for other governmental programs.
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Mark,Thanks for pointing out the origin of the phrase. Wikipedia attributes it to "Doug Wead who used it as the title of a speech in 1979." In the Bush era I used to tell people "Compassionate conservativism is neither."
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In my view, a slogan that gets co-opted for political ends is often doomed.
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"Money is fungible. A dollar sent to the government is a dollar sent to government no matter what its intended purpose."While true, the accounting gimmicks of credits and debits serve a useful function by breaking the budget into manageable pieces. If the highway trust fund (gas taxes) is falling short, perhaps that revenue stream should be revisited.
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"balancing the finances of our country on the backs of the poor is not something to be wished for"I don't think that I have heard anyone say this is their wish. While I think it is perhaps my most detested phrase, the goal is to have everyone pay their "fair share". Requiring everyone to have a dog in the fight is what I think most conservatives are looking for. It is obvious (at least to me) that since the rich pay most of the taxes, they are going to pay off most of the debt/deficit.All of this is part of the class-warfare agenda being waged by the political parties. It gets down to how we frame how Americans will view ourselves – as a European-like welfare society or as the individualist American. So despite the fact that a "welfare state will have a large number of net beneficiaries", it is important in a big picture / the principal of it sort of way.
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Dave! Writes:"It gets down to how we frame how Americans will view ourselves -as a European-like welfare society or as the individualist American."False dichotomy.How does a safety net suppress individualism?
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Individualist was perhaps not the best term to use…perhaps self-reliant instead. Self-reliance or reliance on government…does one believe, in a general sense, that the gov should be responsible for your particular well-being or is it up to you? I would argue that the larger the "safety net" (or "welfare state"), the more a persons tendency towards self-reliance is curbed. Having a minimal safety net probably promotes risk taking. But as that net grows in scope and size, the need to risk anything disappears, as does the ability and practice of overcoming obsticles. One tends to work harder and smarter, plan, prepare and save more if your life depends on it.
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Dave!What is everyone's hang up with the "safety net"? I've been middle/working class all my life, everyone we know as friends and business associates are the same. None of them is looking for a government hand out or a welfare check in the mail. The increased money we've had to spend the last few years on UI, food stamps, medicaid, AFDC are all direct results of a financial meltdown that most of these people were simply in the way of. It's a thriving middle class that will bring us out of this hole not a few hundred billionaires. Our only goal right now should be figuring out a way to put everyone who wants a job back to work, period. Poorly educated men and women work all their lives sometimes and never really get ahead but they do pay into SS and Medicare through payroll taxes and I don't believe they're part of the problem. As far as they know they paid their dues to retire with a semblance of dignity if not much else. I really hate that they're even called an entitlement, much less a "welfare state", or that these people expect the government to take care of them, they've paid in what was expected of them. If you want to change the rules now, go ahead and try, but not everyone is always going to be able to reach the echelon where they will be self-reliant when they reach 65. Most middle class Americans barely even have a nest egg at all these days but they'll work if they can find a job. I don't believe for a second that these are the "moochers" who shun self-reliance.
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The largest pieces of the 'welfare state' are social security & Medicare, which are available to the ~12% of Americans over 65, plus those otherwise unable to work. Even then, more Americans are waking up to the pittance that is social-security. It is designed as a safety net, not a comfortable retirement. Point being: where's this 'welfare state' I keep hearing about? Nobody's writing me checks & I keep hearing news stories about the growing rate of food-shelf use in formerly middle class suburbs.
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"It is designed as a safety net, not a comfortable retirement."I disagree with the safety net characterization of SS. Safety net benefits are not universal. For SS to fit this, you'd have to introduce means testing. SS is a simple transfer of assets from the from young to old and/or the disabled.
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It may not technically be a safety net NoVA, but try telling that to the people who paid in when they were young and now have only that to show for a life of work. Or even the people my husbands age who had to being drawing at 62 because they were so broke after the housing crash and employment prospects that they've gone through whatever other retirement savings they may have had and are underwater on their homes. Many of them couldn't even wait until 66, the optimum age to begin drawing especially if your spouse who earned less survives you. It feels like a safety net to them. And I can tell you it doesn't feel like and entitlement or welfare either. Some may disagree, but they feel they've earned it after paying in for over 40 years and they'd like to think it'll be there for their kids and grandkids when they need it also.
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"ut try telling that to the people who paid in when they were young and now have only that to show for a life of work"I guess that's my biggest objection. They really have nothing to show for it. Nothing that they have total control over anyway, which is a frightening proposition
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"SS is a simple transfer of assets from the from young to old and/or the disabled."Not entirely true. There is a wealth redistribution aspect to it also – the "wealthier" pay pay in more and receive a smaller percentage back than the less wealthy."where's this 'welfare state' I keep hearing about?"Spending on the three entitlement(SS/Medicare/Medicaid) programs will rise to between 16% and 17% in 2035 from roughly 10% of GDP today, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office. Over the past four decades the federal government has spent an average of 18.5% of GDP for everything in the federal budget except interest. Real GDP continues to grow (long-term trend). What people are getting is only one way to look at it. "Our only goal right now should be figuring out a way to put everyone who wants a job back to work, period."Exactly! We need to entice people/institutions with the capital to create jobs. But as workers we need to create our own work opportunties. It is your responsibility to find a job – not the government's responsibility to find one for you (or create one for you). It is in their best interest obviously to help you in that matter but it is on you.
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"I disagree with the safety net characterization of SS. Safety net benefits are not universal."OK. Whether its called a safety net is irrelevant. How does a program that serves retirees and people unable to work amount to a 'welfare state?'
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"wealth redistribution"Every transaction that takes place amounts to wealth redistribution. Most of these transactions help redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich – but nobody raises a fuss when that happens. Why all the concern when it goes the other way? Its going to end up back at the top anyway, if the trend of wealth concentration continues.
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bsimon:Every transaction that takes place amounts to wealth redistribution.This is wrong. Indeed, it is profoundly wrong, and shows a deep misunderstanding of the nature of value and free market transactions. Most free market transactions result in an increase in value for each participant, not a transfer of value or wealth from one to the other.
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Dave, thanks for posting those numbers. They're largely the result of 2 things: pending retirement of the boomers & the astronomical rate of growth in healthcare costs. Neither amounts to some kind of widespread welfare state of slackers, where the lazy majority sponge off the industrious few.
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Oh profound one; why then do we not consider the value gained by the wealthy when they contribute their dollars to the common good? Or do we only consider abstract value when the poor give their dollars to the rich?
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"How does a program that serves retirees and people unable to work amount to a 'welfare state?" I don't think retirees are entitled to a portion of my paycheck just because. and lots of people object to the "redistribution up" phenomenon. It's just less visible.
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"I don't think retirees are entitled to a portion of my paycheck just because. "Its a free market. If that price is too high, you can choose not to work.
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It is your responsibility to find a job – not the government's responsibility to find one for you (or create one for you)Yeah, I'm pretty sure all the people sending in resume after resume and never even getting a call or interview know it's on them. Or maybe you have the choice of going to Texas to get one of their jobs but you can't sell your house in CA because you're underwater. There are all sorts of reasons right now that people can't find jobs and most of them aren't because they're not trying. In years past when we had these levels of unemployment the government worked to create the opportunity or at least find work that needed to be done anyway. Obviously, the job creators have the money, many of them are sitting on the cash, what are they waiting for? They're waiting for the middle class to get back to work and start spending again, quite a conundrum.
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bsimon:why then do we not consider the value gained by the wealthy when they contribute their dollars to the common good?I don't know if there is any value gained in such transactions. Value is an individual measurement. Goods and services do not have an instrinsic, objectively determinable value. What is valuable to me, and worth the $10 I have to pay for it may not be valuable to you and worth the $10 you have to pay for it.In free market transactions, we know that each participant is getting at least an equivalent value to what he gives up, precisely because it is free. They willingly do it.When a person is forced to provide money for a given good or service, we have no way of knowing whether the value he receives is equal to, greater than, or less than, the value he has to give up to get it.
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"Its a free market. If that price is too high, you can choose not to work."we've considered that — more seriously than I would have thought. Our expenses, namely child care, would be drastically reduced with one of us at home. If we have another kid, the math suggests that one of us quit our job, b/c that spouse's salary will essentially be covering day care and taxes. why put in 50+ hours week and have be on call on the weekends for clients for that. not worth it.
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NoVASS is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever created and it is funded through a tax that everyone pays. None of us know what the future holds or whether we'll be able to hang on to our savings, our homes, our jobs, our own health or that of our spouse, and so we work together and contribute together to ensure that everyone has at least a minimum to subsist on in their later years. We've been doing it for over 75 years now and every generation we have to adjust it slightly to preserve it for the next generation. You won't find that many Americans who will want to radically change it or eliminate it simply because it does work as advertised. And precisely because of the situation many 50+ people find themselves in now, in this moment in time, it's a program this is now and will save many of them from poverty in the near future.
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"SS is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever created and it is funded through a tax that everyone pays"I disagree. I think it's created dependency. If the only thing keeping seniors out of poverty is the good graces of Congress and the American voter, that's an artificial view of "not poor." Look how politicians demagogue the issue. "vote for me or your benefits get it." that's not security, that's extortion.
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"SS is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever created and it is funded through a tax that everyone pays."To the extent you want to maintain it as an anti-poverty program via means testing, you will probably be able to get pretty broad based support for this. To the extent it's a transfer program from poorer, younger people to better off older people, you won't. Prime example is the fight over COLA's. Elliot Spitzer had a good observation over this:"We have also had a full-fledged intergenerational transfer of wealth going on in our nation. The programs that consume the greatest percentage of our federal budget benefit seniors—Medicare and Social Security in particular—and have been rather well protected by politicians. The investments that benefit the younger generation—education, housing, and job training for instance—fall by and large into the non-defense discretionary spending part of the budget that has been subject to the most cuts.We are facing a moral dilemma. We have actually done a reasonably effective job preserving the income of seniors. Medicare and Social Security have worked, future financing issues notwithstanding. But we are failing abysmally in investing in the next generation. How can we do both in a financially viable manner?"The answer, which he avoids, is that you can't. Something has to give. In any event, the budgetary problems with Social Security are trivial compared to Medicare were beneficiaries receive three times back what they paid into the system.
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bsimon:Its a free market. If that price is too high, you can choose not to work.This is also incorrect. The FICA tax is not a function or part of any "free market". In fact its imposition is precisely the opposite of a free market.
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Scott, Nova above supports my point: if the tax burden is too high, some will choose not to work. The gov't certainly isn't forcing me to work, or even live here. The payroll tax and income tax are a cost if doing business, so to speak. It would be unreasonable for me to expect to enjoy the benefits of living here at no cost.
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in a true free market, it wouldn't be an either/or situation. but that my family is had a somewhat serious conservation that raised this issue, if nothing else, speak to the lunacy of the current tax code.
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"This is also incorrect. The FICA tax is not a function or part of any "free market". In fact its imposition is precisely the opposite of a free market. "The extent to which this is considered a "free market" decision is the extent to which you have options other than living under the taxing authority imposing the FICA tax.
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"which you have options other than living under the taxing authority imposing the FICA tax"maximizing your non-W2 income would be a good way to achieve that.
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bsimon:if the tax burden is too high, some will choose not to work.I agree with that. What I object to is casting it as a "free market" decision.The gov't certainly isn't forcing me to work…No, that would be the nature of reality that does that.It would be unreasonable for me to expect to enjoy the benefits of living here at no cost.Of course. But government spending does not equal "the benefits of living here".
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I agree that the tax code is a mess. However, there are benefits even for the little guy; most of my wife's income goes into a 401k. Between that & 2 kids in daycare, we don't get much cash income from her work; but we will enjoy the fruits of that labor eventually. And compounded.
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"maximizing your non-W2 income would be a good way to achieve that."My main point is the idea that countries can compete for talent as well via taxation and immigration policy. We've been used to being the beneficiary of say bad tax and spending policy in Greece for so long that we don't consider that the United States can start to be a net exporter of entrepreneurial talent.
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jncI think we all pretty much agree that Medicare is a mess but there are fixes to SS that can and will preserve it without too much pain on the current or future beneficiaries. We've made changes before, people a year or two ahead of my husband got to retire at 65, he has to wait until 66, oh well, we'll live. It's a benefit cut but one we can live with. My husband and I never thought we'd even need SS because we had a plan. Unfortunately, life gets in the way of best laid plans and sometimes whether you think you're going to depend on it or not you end up needing it. I never thought I'd give up my career three times, but I did. I never planned on five kids, three was always my max, until my brother in law died and my sister permanently injured. We never expected to have a daughter with a serious enough illness to make the medical journals and cost us a ton of money with a 20% co-pay. We didn't know we'd have to give up traveling and new cars to put five kids through college and sometimes not have enough left over for the utility bills. You never know how things will work out and SS is just a little bit of a price we pay to give us a little security we may or may not need when we get older.
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United States can start to be a net exporter of entrepreneurial talent.But we're exceptional! but that's a point that had not occurred to me.
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"You never know how things will work out and SS is just a little bit of a price we pay to give us a little security we may or may not need when we get older."I suppose I just don't have enough faith in the system to trust it for those purposes.
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"maximizing your non-W2 income would be a good way to achieve that."I posted the other day that the road to wealth in this country is finding a way to make money from the labor of others. For those of us uninterested in starting companies, the next best thing is saving & investing; particularly in tax-advantaged accounts.
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I suppose I just don't have enough faith in the system to trust it for those purposes.You're not the first generation that felt that way. Scott, can you, or someone else, look at my bits & pieces tonight and see if you can get that vid up for me. Feel free to add something anyone, I'm not Kevin.
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I'm not Kevin= I don't have his skills
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NoVAI think we are exceptional, as a nation, we're just not utilizing our talent and skills very productively IMO.
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lms — yeah, but i wonder if the cynicism is worse now. in talking with a brother of friend who is younger than i am (early 20s) he said that if given the choice between "social security and an xbox" he'd take the xbox today, because at least it's an asset that he'd own. and i thought i was jaded.
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see you all tomorrow
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G'night NoVA, maybe, but remember I grew up in the 60's and didn't trust the government as far as I could spit.
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"lms — yeah, but i wonder if the cynicism is worse now. in talking with a brother of friend who is younger than i am (early 20s) he said that if given the choice between "social security and an xbox" he'd take the xbox today, because at least it's an asset that he'd own. and i thought i was jaded."Great quote on the current tax and spending debate:"Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.""Going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation" exactly describes the funding/structure issues that your friend perceives.
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jnc:The extent to which this is considered a "free market" decision is the extent to which you have options other than living under the taxing authority imposing the FICA tax.True, but most people do not have those options. I have lived overseas and worked under different tax authorities (although I still operated under the US tax authority, one of the few in the world to impose global taxation), but I was sponsored by a company which got me my visa. It is difficult to simply show up and say "here I am, take me in." Most nations won't do that.Which is why I am largely in favor of pushing government spending, and hence taxation, down to the lowest level of government possible, either state or even more local levels. Hence those tax and spend policies can be escaped if one find them too onerous, and a reasonable semblance of a "free market" in tax policy would actually exist.Of course, there are those who prefer to push tax and spend policies to the highest possible level of government, in order to cast the net as wide as possible and make it as difficult as possible to escape them. Even within this context, it is clear they are against free markets.
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bsimon:I posted the other day that the road to wealth in this country is finding a way to make money from the labor of others.Interestingly, doing so takes rather a lot of, er, work.
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lms:Scott, can you, or someone else, look at my bits & pieces tonight and see if you can get that vid up for me. Feel free to add something anyone, I'm not Kevin.Will do.
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Part II read this the other day, and my main thought was, what is his point? Why is he trying to sound like a liberal, attacking a dumb straw man and dismissing a point about welfare statism that smart conservatives have understood for centuries: once enough of a population is using government to extract money from the rest, there is a serious problem of justice and dangerous tyranny at hand.There is no "misconception" that people who don't pay income taxes also don't pay payroll taxes. I've never seen a single person say that. That people pay payroll taxes is irrelevant to the observation that they don't pay income taxes. When liberals set up this false target, they are trying to evade the issue, and it is no different with Ramesh.Part the problem with Ramesh's column is that he uses the same kind of mischaracterization that liberals typically do in order to avoid the point. He attacks straw men. Like this:The argument these conservatives are making has two components. First, it is wrong as a matter of civic morality for some people — let alone large numbers of people — to contribute nothing to the support of the federal government.He goes on to make the smashing point that most of these nonpayers do contribute something rather than nothing. Aha! Gotcha! But, of course, the point isn't that they pay nothing for anything in any form, it's that they don't pay income tax, which hits those of us who do pay very hard is supposed to be the primary source of general funding. Since Ramesh wants to play liberal word games, we could rephrase his characterization of the argument in a way that is more accurate and harder to evade: it is wrong as a matter of civic morality for some people–let alone large numbers of people–not to contribute their fair share to the support of the federal government. Or we coulds say, not to contribute to the main source of general funding. Ramesh is just avoiding the issue.His argument that income and payroll taxes shouldn't be distinguished is equally obtuse. He says:The irony here is that FDR deliberately and explicitly introduced the payroll tax to accompany Social Security because it would encourage people to draw this false connection.Yes, it was set up that way, but it isn't a false connection to note that payroll taxes are supposed to be dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. While Ramesh argues that accepting this debatable premise is falling into FDR's trap, he overlooks the fact that most people see the issue precisely this way, particularly most people (as evidenced in lms's comments, for example) who depend or expect to depend on these programs. In other words, while he criticizes conservatives for accepting what he claims is a false premise, he ignores the reality that most people believe that premise, whether or not it is false, and that is the real problem. Moreover, he seems to imply here that conservatives should instead stand up and start saying, Social Security is or should be rolled into the general budget and treated like everything else in it. No one should imagine any longer that payroll taxes are different from income taxes; they fund the overall budget. But of course this would be giving the left one of their now-cherished goals of transforming Social Security into a more true welfare and redistribution program funded not by a flat tax but by more progressive taxes. Means testing would quickly follow, and many of us who for decades paid in the most would never see any return at all on this "investment" that Uncle Sam tended for us.
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Part IIRamesh's "empirical" argument is even weaker:A relatively large proportion of the citizenry paid income taxes in the early 1960s. It didn’t stop the Great Society from being enacted. The number of people who pay no income taxes moved up fast between 2006 and 2010, which has helped set off conservative alarms. But voters turned sharply right between the elections of those two years.Talk about cherry picking and selective perception, and non sequiturs! Income taxes in the 1960s were also much more progressive, and government grew by leaps and bounds in the 60s and 70s as punitive rates heaped the tax burden on "the rich" or at least were perceived to do so. Why not draw that connection? Voters certainly didn't turn sharply right in 2008, and it's a dubious claim that they turned sharply right in 2010. We tend to exaggerate the meaning of elections, which in fact turn on much smaller shifts in voting patterns, and on many different issues, than Ramesh is suggesting. Moreover, he argues in the very same column that much of the sharp upward spike in the number of nonpayers was a result of the economic slump, that is, people stopped owing taxes because they were no longer earning enough to pay taxes. Why, then, would he not take the 2010 election as evidence of people's being unemployed and economically distressed, rather than as some reaction related to tax rates (which of course did not change)? Why not say that the 2006 and 2008 elections — lurching to the left — were reactions to the reductions in lower income tax burdens under Bush that Ramesh himself outlines? Wouldn't that be clear empirical proof of the kind he says we should see? Why not look at the long arc of history under which, regardless of the changing rate structure, "the rich" have continued to bear more and more of the income tax burden, and at the same time the size of government has continued to grow?There simply is no proof of the sort he imagines in one election result.The story also relies on implausible psychological assumptions. It assumes that people who pay payroll taxes but not income taxes make a sharp distinction between the two. But what if they, or many of them, simply think that they have paid taxes?On what planet is he living? Many people aren't even conscious of the fact that payroll taxes are deducted, but, of those who are, many very clearly do make a distinction, which is reflected in the attitude described by lms in her comments: I paid into SS, now I have the right to get back what I paid for!
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Part IIIIt assumes, further, that immediate circumstances matter more than long-term ones.This argument makes little sense. It isn't at all psychologically implausible that people in lower income brackets who perceive themselves as net beneficiaries of a skewed tax system may tend to vote to perpetuate the growth of benefits and the concentration of the burden on "the rich." Ramesh is suggesting that this is contrary to conservative assumptions about human nature, because people in lower income strata will vote on the optimistic premise that they will someday be rich. This is in fact completely contrary to conservative assumptions about human nature and behavior.When we say that punitive taxes disincentivize work and investment, we aren't saying something that is necessarily about the long term. It depends. If the top tax rate were suddenly set at 90% for income over $100,000, many people would equally suddenly find that they had much less incentive to work a full year next year. If a large, new entitlement or social welfare program were enacted that would immediately benefit lower income people and make living on low earned income much more comfortable, does Ramesh really imagine it would not alter their incentives? Ramesh goes on to argue that, if the critique of the fact that a system with a large percentage who pay nothing were correct then the real problem would be the entire set of people who are net beneficiaries of government, including those who pay something but get back more. Well, that could be entirely true. Indeed, that's part of the conservative critique of big government. More and more people become hogs at the trough. Again, where has Ramesh been these past 30 years? Has he ever read the publication that published his column?Those questions may sound insulting, but Ramesh's argument is in fact willfully blind or ignorant to much of what conservatives have been saying for years. Forever, in fact. He ends by arguing that conservatives should try to cut benefits rather than make everyone pay taxes, because the latter would be unpopular. And cutting benefits won't be? He also falsely characterizes the conservative critique as implying that the republic was flawed at its founding for lacking an income tax under which everyone would help pay. It implies no such thing. It implies that, since we now have an income tax, everyone who earns income should pay it, and that this becomes especially important now that we have a burgeoning welfare state. I am mystified why Ramesh is at pains to misconstrue conservative arguments and erect straw men like this.I would very much like to see his thoughts about the current political climate and discourse, in which the Democratic Party is pursuing a rhetorical campaign of divisive and often vitriolic "populism" aimed at pushing more and more of the burden of government on to a minority while extending more benefits to the other half. Does he find this a healthy situation? Does he think that the pandering and demogoguery win no votes and are completely unsuccessful? Is the Democratic Party that politically stupid? Is that what happened in 2008?Now and then, even someone as smart as Ramesh goes off the rails.
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I think this comment at NRO also hit a nail on the head:"Many great comments here opposing Ramesh's contentions. To me, the crux is a difference in the definition of "fairness". Many conservatives believe fairness means everyone pays a share of the federal government burden, with many (myself included) feel that all should pay an equal share. Ponnuru's belief seems to be in social engineering through income redistribution (see his numerous past posts on the child tax credit). IMO, his is not a conservative policy position, but, as others mentioned, a political strategy – try not to alienate the "middle class" by continuing to transfer money to favored groups. It's this kind of thinking that got us in the mess we're in now, Ramesh – why don't you see that?"
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