There Is No Libertarian or Conservative Argument for Higher Taxes

Eli Lehrer has an article on the FrumForum entitled “Five Revenue Raisers the GOP Should Back.” He argues it would be good to get rid of preferences such as the state and local tax deduction and the mortgage interest deduction, and he also asserts that there should be “user fees” for things such as transportation.

As an avid supporter of a flat tax and market pricing, I have no objection to these policies. Indeed, I would love to get rid of the state and local tax deduction so that taxpayers in Texas and Florida no longer have to subsidize the fiscal profligacy of politicians in California and New York.

But there is a giant difference between getting rid of certain tax preferences as part of revenue-neutral (or even better, tax-cutting) tax reform and getting rid of tax preferences in order to give politicians more revenue to spend.

The former is a noble goal. Who can argue, after all, with the idea of getting rid of the corrupt and punitive internal revenue code and replacing it with a simple and fair flat tax? Lots of loopholes are eliminated, so there are plenty of tax-raising provisions in tax reform. But every one of those provisions is offset by provisions that lower tax rates and get rid of double taxation of saving and investment.

The latter, by contrast, is an exercise in trying to lose with minimal damage – sort of the “French Army Theory” of taxation, surrender gracefully and hope that your new masters give you a few crumbs after their celebratory feast.

What is especially strange about this approach is that the Republicans who advocate higher taxes claim that they are political realists. Yet if we look at real-world evidence, the moment Republicans show their “realism” by putting taxes on the table, the entire debate shifts.

Instead of the debate being tax-hikes vs. no-tax-hikes, it becomes a debate over who-should-pay-more-tax. Republicans win the first debate. They get slaughtered in the second debate.

Remember when the first President Bush agreed to enter into tax-hike negotiations in 1990? He set out two conditions – that there should be a reduction in the capital gains tax and that there should be no increase in income tax rates. So what happened? As everyone with an IQ above room temperature predicted, the capital gains tax stayed the same and income tax rates increased.

Last but not least, this conversation only exists because some people have thrown in the towel, acquiescing to the idea that there is no way to balance the budget without higher taxes. Yet the Congressional Budget Office data shows that the budget can be balanced by 2020 simply by limiting annual spending growth to 2 percent.

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Low-Income Workers Are the Second Victims of Obamacare

This blog already has noted that Obamacare crippled the market for “kids only” health insurance policies. Unsurprisingly, that is just the beginning of the bad news. The latest development is that health policies designed to provide insurance to low-income workers may no longer be economically feasible. The Wall Street Journal comments.

Among President Obama’s core health-care promises was that Americans can keep their current coverage if they like it. Among the reasons that a new ObamaCare squall blows in every other day is that this claim simply is not true, as people are discovering. The latest fracas was incited by Janet Adamy’s scoop in the Journal this week that McDonald’s Corp. may be forced to cancel its current coverage for 29,500 employees as a result of ObamaCare. McDonald’s told Health and Human Services regulators that new mandates will make its plans “economically prohibitive” and cause “a huge disruption” unless it gets a waiver. …The entire philosophical and policy architecture of ObamaCare is explicitly designed to standardize health benefits and how those benefits should be paid for. Those choices and tradeoffs will be made for everyone by Ms. Sebelius’s regulators. …Around 2.5 million consumers are covered by “mini-med” policies, most of them concentrated in low-wage industries like fast food, hospitality and retail that have large numbers of part-time or temporary workers. In the case of the restaurants, 75% of the workforce turns over every year and nearly half are under age 25. Mini-med plans are a temporary stopgap for businesses that have low margins and face high labor and health costs. But Democrats hate mini-med and other skinny-benefit plans, calling them “underinsurance.” ObamaCare is meant to run them out of the market by mandating benefits, eliminating coverage caps and certain technical rules about how premiums must be spent. …In other words, the choice is between relatively affordable coverage that isn’t as generous as Democrats think it should be and dumping coverage entirely. McDonald’s may eventually offer the high-cost plans that Ms. Sebelius favors, or get its waiver, but many of its less profitable or smaller competitors won’t. While subsidized ObamaCare options will be available in 2014, those costs will merely be transferred to taxpayers.

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