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Can state spending ever be cut?
wealth.goldmoney.com / BY ALASDAIR MACLEOD / MARCH 16, 2017
President Trump was elected on several promises, including one that he would fund tax cuts by cutting public spending. Cynics might note that his first action was to increase spending on the military by $54bn, the equivalent of six Polish armies.
This is not a good start. Trump is hailed, in some quarters, as a latter-day Reagan, a Republican president who understood the impotence of the state, and how it is a burden on free enterprise. This is not a good precedent either.
Taxes and deficits increased under Reagan. As Murray Rothbard put it in a 1988 retrospective on Reagan’s years in the White House:
“In the first place, the famous tax cut of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It’s true that tax rates for higher income tax brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason was that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase. One was ‘bracket creep,’ a term for inflation quietly but effectively raising one into higher tax brackets, so that you pay more and proportionately higher taxes even though the tax rate schedule has officially remained the same. The second source of higher taxes was Social Security taxation, which kept increasing, and which helped taxes go up overall.”
The post Can state spending ever be cut? appeared first on Silver For The People.
Source: http://silveristhenew.com/2017/03/16/can-state-spending-ever-be-cut/
