http://www.friesian.com/money.htm

This is now the greatest problem in American politics:  the promotion of essentially Marxist ideas, which are so discredited by history and science and morality as to be laughable, by an educated intelligentsia, among academia, the press, and the literati, who depend only on the power of their own sophistry. This makes them perfect shills for interest-group politics, where the only real interest is in getting money out of the government. For this to work, taxes and spending must be as high as possible. But then it was discovered, during the Reagan years, that spending could be run up far beyond the tax base without immediate consequences. The deficit spending that had been the animus of conservatives since the New Deal now was sold to conservatives on the principle that the relatively low tax rates did promote prosperity, while the high spending bought off the interest groups. The future, evidently, could take care of itself.

Nevertheless, interest-group politicians, meaning all Democrats and most Republicans (or at least most Republicans in office), retained an instinctive love of taxes. The credulous President Bush was thus duped, with old fashioned fiscally conservative arguments, to break his only meaningful campaign promise of 1988, and his only real link to the Reagan political constitutency, by raising taxes. A Democratic Congress then never bothered providing the promised spending reductions. President Clinton, under the deceptive "New Democrat" banner, but still a whole-hearted believer in taxes, spending, and socialist command-economy devices for politically hot areas like "health care" and "child care," slowed the recovery from Bush's 90-91 recession with his own tax increases.

A new Republican Congress in 1995 derailed, somewhat, where that was all headed; but it is now clear that the Republicans have been corrupted both by the same interest group politics and by fear of the self-righteous disdain of the intelligentsia. They have thus cooperated with Clinton in the lie that hemorrhaging "social" spending, whose liabilities are kept off budget, does not count and that a "balanced budget" will soon arrive.

They have also joined in the despicable practice of transferring expenses from the government to private business by mandating uneconomic "benefits," like "family leave." The government thus can hand out goodies by law rather than by taxing and spending.

This evades the truth that, as Walter Williams says, "businesses are tax collectors, not tax payers," which means that people will be paying for these "benefits" anyway, in higher prices, higher unemployment, lower wages, or in whatever ways that businesses will need to use to finance them. It is only the forseeable bankruptcies of Social Security and Medicare, hurried by any unforseen problems with the economy, that will put an end to the continuation of this era of political dishonesty and looting.

We have just heard from one of the "haves".