Taxing, Spending, and Entitlements Explained
This is a fantastic video. Breaks it down for all the pro-taxation/pro-entitlements crowd (ie. leftists, Democrats, progressives, and other Statists) with simple pie charts. I love pie charts, don’t you? Anyway, watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u24nH03NccI
I’m going to repeat the two main talking points of the video, because they’re perfectly succinct and dead on:
1. Current tax revenues are more than is needed to run the government without incurring any debt.
And that’s today. With the majority of Americans (read: poor people) not paying taxes at all.
Does that make sense to you guys? What he’s saying, and accurately so, is that all the arguments about needing more money for, as big-government proponents argue, “highways and bridges and military and federal buildings” are bogus. The arguments about tax dollars being squandered on war are bogus. It’s all covered. In fact, there’s a surplus of funds. We could actually cut taxes, and the government would get along just fine. Relatively speaking, it doesn’t cost that much to run a government.
So why do people insist that we need to tax more? The video answers that for us too (though, any idiot should be able to figure it out quite easily): the true goal isn’t government funding; it’s power, by means of redistribution of wealth.
And—ignoring the fact that it’s completely wrong in the first place—it’s totally, undeniably, unforgivably out of control.
Which leads us to Point #2:
2. If you cut all government spending, tax revenues are not enough to pay entitlements without adding debt.
Can you get that through your heads, folks? Even if we didn’t spend a single penny to run the federal government and fund its infrastructure, we still wouldn’t have enough to cover the entitlement programs. It’s that bad. The food stamps, the health care, the housing assistance—it’s too much. We can’t afford it. It’s that simple. The problem with this country, the reason it’s in the state it’s in is entitlement spending. I don’t see how any honest, intelligent, rational person could possibly believe otherwise.
And the thing about entitlement programs is: it’s discretionary. We don’t need to be spending this money. Our federal government doesn’t need to spend this money in order to operate. But here’s the dirty little secret of it (and I’ve been saying this for years): Democrats want people to receive entitlements. Forever, if possible. Every time they characterize it as “giving people a hand up?” Yea, that is an overt lie.
See, Democrats (and Statists in general) require their voting base to be destitute and dependent upon them. I suspect they actually encourage it. It keeps them in power. Because you know what happens after the intention of the entitlements (to get people back on their feet) is realized? The person receiving them stops needing the government. A successful, independent, self-reliant individual doesn’t need the government—and generally doesn’t want them around. This strips the government of power over people in other areas (namely, regulatory areas).
This is also why no Democrat/Statist in the history of the world has ever made good on his promises. They will never fully deliver. Because the minute they do, the people won’t need them anymore. Instead, they partially deliver, and continue to insist that they need to “keep working” and “look to the future.” (Listen to any random speech by Barack Obama, and tell me he’s not the poster child for that.) It’s a perpetual, never-ending cycle of entitlements for votes. And when they talk about helping you—what they’re really talking about is helping themselves, by securing that vote. (It’s not unlike the relationship between a drug dealer and an addict. He gets you hooked, you’ll do pretty much anything for your next fix, and all the while he pretends to be doing you a favor by keeping you addicted—but the reality is: he’s getting paid, and you remain a junkie.)
Problem is now, the cycle has gotten out of hand. The government doesn’t take in enough (despite their efforts to tax the rich and overtly redistribute wealth) to keep the cycle going—so now they have to borrow, and keep borrowing to unsustainable amounts.
So the question remains: Why? Why would a person support this? I’m guessing that nobody reading this actually work for the federal government in any capacity that they could benefit from such a scheme—so what is it? Who in their right mind would support such a thing, and wish for it to continue, seeing it starkly presented for exactly what it is?
Is it simply entitlement addiction? If so, then why wouldn’t you want to break that addiction? Do you really think your subordination to the federal government is worth it?
