DT's comments on Brooks's column on fiscal policy

Dan ThomasCedar Falls, IowaApril 2nd, 20107:53 amThis is one of those essays, Mr. Brooks, that addresses a vitally important issue and mucks it up, big time. The obfuscation begins with the mocking-nature of the title, continues through the mischaracterization of the root of the problem, and culminates with the all-too-common descrediting of a solution that would hurt the folks who have benefited most unfairly from the fiscal mess that is laid at the feet of over-spending Democrats that want to give the store away to the undeserving.

To be sure, a government running fiscal policies like ours in 1960 would have been voted out on their ear in short order. But the fiscal policy it 1961 had a revenue source in an income tax code that had upper brackets for the super rich that vanished in the 1980s.

Now we have a "political class" that is as polarized as are "the voters" despite your stylistic tendency to ascribe uniform motives and miscues to both as if politics in fiscal policy, like Obama's dreams of bipartisanship, was impertinent. If the overplayed animosity of the tea-baggers at the spending side of HCR is in big part due to Republican distortions about the nature of this reform and the costs it imposes on average taxpayers -- and the so-called tea-baggers themselves are as much an artifact of Dick Armey's Freedom Works and the Sarah Palin media show -- it's fair to ask why the other side of the fiscal equation's imbalance has failed to turn out the protestors egged on by the likes of Steve King on the portico of the Capitol.

The beneficiaries, like Mr. Armey who's cashed in his government service days, as a well-paid lobbyist, of the post-Reagan and post- Bradley-Gephardt Tax Reform Act have been understandably reluctant to frame their complaints with the fiscal problem on the revenue side. It's always a lament of the need to cut spending when they know full well that, unless they're serious about gutting the popular entitlement programs or taking on the defense budget, where we spend more than a dollar of every two spent globally each year -- the root of TEA in their lexicon (Taxed Enough Already) -- the answer is on the revenue side. Like we might have with health care, there's not only much to be learned on this side of the policy challenge from our overseas advanced democratic cohorts; there's as much to be learned from our own history.

It wasn't that long ago, that the "tax expenditures" so decried by the likes of Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, and the current crop of Congressional Republicans would have been treated by the press, a half of the "political class," and a fair portion of the "voters" as bearing as much responsibility for the obscene deficits facing future generations as the projected increases in payroll taxes that wealthier taxpayers will foot to augment the bigger pool of premiums to pay for the health reform start. But why no complaints in the pundit class or in the astro-turfed popular rebellion over the big government takeover at the free-loading class that received a collective benefit of over $150 billion annually in "tax expenditures" under the Bush tax cuts -- and still do?

Until this side of the equation in our fiscal crisis is addressed honestly -- minus the imaginary "ecstacy" of such problem-solving -- folks like the derivative trader that boasted of a $4 billion profit last year will persist in gaming the system where the so-called "political class" closes its collective eyes to the fact that they, in the cold reality of our fiscal mess, are the real "free loaders" under the alleged expansion of big government at the federal level.