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If Obama Wins, A long 4 years ahead

Nov 3, 2008 at 3:07 PM

Alfred Holzheu in Economics

E.J.’s ‘Middleman’

The Washington Post’s left-liberal columnist E.J. Dionne sums up the tax debate as follows:

For years, Republicans have argued that the way to help struggling working people is to give more money to the wealthy. Obama is saying that we should cut out the middleman and help working people directly. My hunch is that Obama’s argument will prevail, and that conservatives will then work overtime to try to deny the judgment that the people have rendered.

Of course what conservatives and Republicans really argue is that high marginal tax rates suppress economic growth, while low ones encourage growth, which in turn creates jobs.

Dionne’s description, though, is worse than tendentious. It’s downright Orwellian. According to him, to tax people less is to "give" them money–as if the money never belonged to them. When the government increases taxes on some people so as to write checks to others, in Dionne’s world that is "cutting out the middleman"–the "middleman" apparently being the productive economy, not the bureaucrats who administer the redistribution schemes of Dionne’s dreams.

We could be in for a long few years.

Article originally appeared on Alfred Holzheu – online and verbose (http://www.holzheu.com/).

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