It always strikes me as interesting that when talk comes up of resolving problem of huge US deficits the left invariably says there must, must be a balance between budget cuts and tax hikes on the 'rich' [in essence defined loosely as anyone who just seems to have too much money] - and yet I never hear any convincing reason as to why there must be this balance - the right at least tries to explain belief that taxes and the big gov't they inspire are counter productive - but what usually happens on the left is that defense of tax increases comes down to vague imputations of 'fairness' but never is fairness explained in any coherent way nor is it made clear how some watery exhortation of balance does anything to enhance the economy - often the magic word is spoken and people react as if the meaning and value of it is perfectly clear - and I guess for the left it is clear: successful people need to be punished because obviously their success happens at the expense of the less successful; that the only true measure of a society is not how much opportunity it offers and how this opportunity in turn translates into an appropriate distribution of potential power but rather how an extant power, demonized by the rubric wealth, can be redeemed by a beneficent and enlightened state redistributing it to those it was ostensibly stolen from.
Now, it's not that I'm against tax increases per se as a matter of some reflexive disgust - I believe tax reform that exalts efficiency and encourages growth is what's necessary but will not therefore automatically tune out talk of tax increases of some sort - no, what I find confounding, galling is wrapping the idea of tax increases in phony ideological populism that seems to have nothing to do with a plan for enhancing the economy - the only real objectives here should be cutting budget deficits while improving productivity, in fact dramatically improving productivity given rising threats from emerging economies - if you can only manage one of those, it has to be the latter because at least increased growth will mitigate damage of former - you definitely cannot do the former at the expense of the latter cause that gets you nowhere - and you very definitely cannot fail to do either - and what all of this very, very definitely should not be about is what oh let's say two tenured, left leaning professors of sociology, sipping tea in a Harvard faculty lounge might, in an existential sense, consider fair.
But, unfortunately, the left will argue that gov't expenditures do increase productivity and that the hard working middle class cannot bear the burden of debt reduction while the wealthy [whose greed of course caused this mess] loll about lazily in golden fields of excess - and so I guess it will end up coming down to ideological palaver and pandering regardless, which inevitably leads to tawdry populist appeals - Obama has already made it very clear this is the path he intends to go down. Are we doomed here? Maybe we're doomed.
