How often do I get to praise The Weekly Standard? There’s much to disagree with in this P.J. O’Rourke essay from their current issue, but where O’Rourke is right, he’s very right:

… a low tax rate is not–never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician–a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out.”

Cutting taxes without also slashing spending is futile, since the ultimate source of all government revenue is the taxpayer. At a given level of spending, the government can pay now with higher taxes, or it can lower taxes now and pay later with higher taxes plus interest. This is not a winning proposition for the forces of smaller government and fiscal responsibility.

That doesn’t mean that taxes shouldn’t be lowered, of course, but it means that cutting spending must be at least as high a priority. And that’s “spending,” i.e. appropriations, not “earmarks,” which just direct the spending toward relatively innocuous uses like building bridges in Alaska and putting projectors in Chicago planetariums. The federal government shouldn’t be doing any of that, but there are much worse uses to which the money can be put, and earmarked spending is among the smaller burdens that Washington imposes of taxpayers.

Filed under: Economics