Minor Thoughts from me to you

I've listened to the weekly Presidential radio addresses, since at least 2005. (Yes, I know that makes me something of a masochist.) Which means that I've heard the last 3 or 4, from President Obama, on the subject of taxes and the Buffet Rule. I've been irritated by them and have wanted to do a take down of them. Thankfully, Reason magazine did it for me.

If there were some kind of award for the most misleading statements in a single four-minute speech, President Obama would have earned it with his weekly address this weekend, timed for tax day.

“We can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Obama said.

This is really something. First of all, who is the “we” in that sentence? The many Americans who don’t pay any income taxes at all, or who take more from the government in welfare or entitlement benefits than they pay in taxes? Second, it’s great to see Mr. Obama start to crack down on unaffordable government spending. But it’s hard to define tax cuts as spending unless you start from the concept that all money belongs to the government to begin with. It’s one thing to conceive of some special tax break as a “tax expenditure.” But it’s not “spending” for the government to allow an individual to keep money that the individual earned or owned in the first place.

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