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08/16/2003: "A Third of a Trillion Tax Dollars Makes for One Big Bonfire!"

This is the third installment of my “Clubbed for Growth” series, spotlighting those wacky tax cut extremists the “Club for Growth.” My point today is that while the Club for Growth’s tax cut extremism has been very effective in Growth of the bank balances of its members (where outflows from Club dues are vastly smaller than the greatly reduced taxes on inflows), their extortion of GOP candidates into parroting their extreme vision has had clear negative impacts for Growth in the economy that most of us live in. The Club’s economic policy is entirely built on a single simplistic assumption: taxation has no impact on the economy other than to impede it. Look at the words and phrases they use, and which, humor aside, are rather accurately documented in our Devil’s Dictionary (BTW, lots of new definitions there!) and you will see it's as of they believed that our tax dollars are being carted to Jack Kent Cooke Football Stadium in Washington DC, piled up to the top of the stands, and burned. If that were what was actually happening, then taxes would indeed be a real burden on the economy. What’s really happening, though, is that tax money finds its way into the pockets of real people, not only government employees like national park rangers, drill sergeants, and air traffic controllers, but also employees of the private companies involved with providing the essential common services that government exists to provide, like blacktop resurfacers for the interstate highways, programmers for the systems that help make sure that sick children (perhaps future Einsteins) don’t die of easily treatable conditions simply because their parents are temporarily laid off, and cancer researchers working from a federal grant. These kinds of government expenses would be foolish to eliminate, which is why the Club gives lip service to reducing government expenses but reserves real action only on the tax side of the equation. Of course, extreme focus on cutting taxes without any consideration whatsoever of what level of government spending is needed (and only fringe anarchists believe that there are no essential government services) is a recipe for imbalance. This imbalance has been resolved over the last twenty years by sticking future generations with the bill. The cost of doing this is massive interest payments on the national debt, for example one third of a trillion dollars ($333 Billion) in 2001. That’s almost as large as defense spending! The irony is that if there is any use of tax dollars that is the equivalent of filling up football stadiums with currency and burning it, it’s interest on the national debt! So in the final analysis, the “Club for Growth,” besides being a club for growth in members’ bank accounts, is also a club for growth in federal debt interest payments, and is thus, more than anything else, a club for burdening the economy.