Taxing the Man Behind the Tree

Don’t tax me; don’t tax thee; tax that fellow behind the tree. — Senator Russell Long

It appears that the President’s budget aims to copy California and Oregon in spending our way to bankruptcy. Additionally, the philosophy noted above is ever-present in the budget.

Increasing taxes in a recession—even threatening to do so—will cause business owners to change their actions. “Why should I expand my business when the government will just take more and more of my money?” This will continue the economic slowdown, causing the need for more spending (in the view of the current Administration) and lead to more tax hikes. It’s a never-ending spiral.

The Tax Lawyer Blog has more on the bad budget coming out of Washington.

The big tax increase is the elimination of the Bush Tax Cuts. Let me be blunt: The ending of a tax cut is a tax increase. President Obama can say that he has never raised taxes, but he’s about to. I’ll have more on this as the year moves forward.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Taxing the Man Behind the Tree”

  1. Peter says:
    February 2, 2010 at 12:16 pm

    Russ,

    Thanks for the link and keep up the great writing. I’ve subscribed to your RSS feed and read you every day.

  2. Bill says:
    February 13, 2012 at 3:36 pm

    Keep up the great work. Hopefully it will wake up some real Americans.
    Bill