I love this quote from Ron Paul’s most recent installment of his weekly column “Texas Straight Talk“.
While Democrats propose to tax and spend, many Republicans aim to borrow and spend, which hurts the taxpayer just as much in the long run.
Republicans who are concerned about increased taxation should be up in arms about the present value of future taxation that we make inevitable by letting the government live outside its means. You can’t lower taxes without lowering spending; you can only defer them –and deferring them to a future generation through debt is, in my opinion, even more immoral then overtaxing the current generation.
What is needed (for both parties) is to lower spending. That can be politically tricky since everything government does costs money, and no leader wants to be seen as doing nothing; but nothing is precisely what should be done at least 90% of the time. That’s one of the reasons the Founding Fathers, through a delicate system of checks and balances, made it so hard to get anything done. Yet we often, as voters, reward candidates who campaign on all kinds of ridiculous, expensive plans. (Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!)
Lowering spending, and in turn taxation, requires both that we mind our own business internationally and let people solve the own problems with their own money domestically. Right now neither major party as a whole can agree to do both, so Americans will have to pay the hefty price until we can bring about serious and meaningful change in American politics.