badgenome said:
Naturally. It's a lot easier to hide behind teachers and firefighters and roads than it is to say, "We need to pay off all our constituencies." |
Exactly. Which is why when even local governments are running out of cash, the first thing they threaten to cut is schools, police, and firefighters. They would never actually go through their budgets and find places where cuts are actually needed. Maybe cut out a few pet projects or stop paying for some vacations. Instead it's much easier to scare the locals into voting to raise taxes so they get to keep everything.
The hilarious thing about this whole tax debate is that even if you confiscated all of the savings from top 10% of taxpayers (they pay a little over 70% of all taxes) you have enough to run the government for a year, maybe two, without having a deficit. Of course, that would completely collapse the economy within that year or two. So this whole notion that all the government needs to do is raise taxes on the top 5% another 10%-20%, and then all our troubles would disappear, is just ridiculous. It just shows the lack of thinking on some people's part.
