In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, By supporting Trump's tax cuts, GOP candidates threaten Jersey's way of life, self-described “one percenter” Eric Schoenberg labeled the Trump tax cuts “reckless” because they must be “paid for” by cutting spending on “a combined $1.3 trillion from Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act,” which he incredibly called “three bedrocks of our healthcare system.”[!]What of the real bedrocks, the producers of healthcare--the doctors, the pharmaceutical and medical device companies, nurses, and other creators--without which the consumers of healthcare, including Schoenberg’s alleged “bedrocks” paid for largely through government spending of our redistributed healthcare dollars would not exist.
Then Schoenberg goes on to lament potential cuts of “$3 trillion more to other vital public services” that, allegedly, would be cut to “pay” for the tax cuts. To be sure, these “cuts” are phantom. They are in fact reductions in the growth rate of spending, not actual spending cuts. Reductions in spending growth is what passes for spending cuts in today’s political jargon. And I doubt that even these phantom cuts will even happen at all. They’ll just run up the debt, rather than cut spending. That’s the achilles heel of tax cuts.
But let’s leave the spending issue aside. For whatever reason, Schoenberg begs the politicians to take and redistribute more of his money. He even advocates “using the tax system to narrow -- rather than widen -- our society's dangerous wealth gap.” Why the wealth gap is “dangerous” or even relevant he doesn’t say. No one ever does. But for all these reasons, he calls for repeal of the Trump tax cuts.
I used my comments, which are no longer available online thanks to the Star-Ledger’s elimination of the comments function, to highlight a real danger growing like a cancer in America. My comments have been edited for clarity:
Tax cuts allow more money to remain in the hands of the people that earn it. If anyone doesn’t want to keep it, they are free to give their tax savings to any cause they support, including the government. No one has the right to speak for everyone else.
Yet that is exactly what Schoenberg is doing. Not everyone wants to pay higher taxes for redistribution. He doesn’t like his tax cut, so he would rescind the Trump tax cuts for everyone else. And that highlights what is increasingly wrong with our culture.
Most people respect others’ rights to live by their own choices and values--until they turn to politics. Then the respect evaporates, and a thug emerges. Freedom is increasingly defined as the right to vote, rather than what freedom really is--the right to live our lives by our own judgement regardless of anyone else's vote. So more and more, people view politics as a moral escape hatch; a chance to do what they wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do privately--force their values on others at gunpoint. The only difference is in their using the government as the hired gun—not Willie Sutton, but Al Capone.
And then we wonder why politics is increasingly polarized, making elections in essence a cold civil war. Increasingly, our ability to make our own economic choices with our own money is at the mercy of other people’s votes. Until we reduce the power of government to tax, spend, redistribute, and regulate, the situation will only get worse. And we’re moving in the wrong direction.
The Founding Fathers ended centuries of often violent religious conflict by taking the weapon of government out of the hands of religious factions, leading to peaceful coexistence for all conscientious beliefs. It’s called the separation of church and state. It’s time for the separation of economics and state, in the same way and for the same reasons, to accomplish the same peaceful coexistence in our economic affairs as in our conscientious affairs.
Finally, notice the insulting way this article is headlined. Is it Schoenberg’s contention that our “Jersey way of life” is that of dependence on government? Schoenberg, a former investment banker and current adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, should go back to making money in investment banking and stop preaching dependence and more taxes to the rest of us.
Related Reading:
What Accounts for Americans’ Widespread Jekyll/Hyde Morality?
Sterba’s ‘Liberty’ to Steal: Marxian Evil by Any Other Name . . .
What does it Mean to Say: "We'll Have to Agree to Disagree?"
Is It Now ‘Respectable’ to be a Moocher?
Justice, not Need, is the Proper Standard for Government Tax Policy
Are We Now a Nation of Moochers and Thieves?
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