http://www.humaneventsonline.com/articles/02-26-01/jeffrey.html Give It the Independence Test By Terence P. Jeffrey If there is one word that should ring through the chambers of Congress in the upcoming tax debate it is this: independence. No other American value is more central to the issue of how much money the government can rightfully take from the people and how they can rightfully take it. There will be many words uttered in the next few months-some true, some false-about whether various tax proposals increase or decrease federal revenues or stimulate or stagnate the national economy. These are interesting and important questions, but they do not cut to the core of whether a tax law is justified or not. Only one question can do that: Does this proposal increase or decrease the independence of individual Americans? Put another way: Does it increase the power of the individual versus the state, or does it increase the power of the state versus the individual? Or put another way: Does it serve freedom or tyranny? At first glance it may seem that any law that returns some tax money to the people would serve freedom. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Liberals have learned how to camouflage a government power grab in the garb of a populist tax cut. Look at the tax cut proposed by then-Vice President Al Gore during last year's presidential campaign. It carried a tell-tale modifier. It was targeted. That meant some Americans would get it, and some would not. How would the government have determined winners and losers? Simple: If you engaged in behavior endorsed by Al Gore, you won; if you did not engage in behavior endorsed by Al Gore, you lost. Had Gore been elected, he would have continued the ongoing conversion of the U.S. tax code from an instrument designed to derive the revenue needed to fund necessary government activities to an instrument designed to coerce Americans into doing what the people in government want them to do. Al Gore's targeted tax cut would have diminished the independence of Americans. Money and Power If you were a mother who put your child in daycare every morning and went off to work, for example, Gore would have increased your existing tax credit for doing so. But if you were a mother who stayed home to take care of your own child-forgoing the added family income of a second breadwinner-Gore would not give you any tax credit. If you sent your son or daughter to Harvard or Princeton, Gore would have given you a tax credit for tuition-if you didn't earn too much. But if your son or daughter became an auto mechanic or manicurist after high school, Gore would have given you no tax credit. The more the U.S. tax code becomes complicated by targeted tax cuts that go only to those who engage in government-approved activities, the more it takes on the nature of a welfare system that transfers wealth to a chosen elite from those who refuse to do, or cannot do, what the government commands them to do. It transfers money from those who love freedom more to those who love it less. It subsidizes a transformation in the American spirit, undermining the republican virtue that makes representative government possible in the first place. Once people have restructured their lives to conform to the behavior that the government demands through the tax code, they become dependent on government's continuing to provide them with the tax relief targeted to that behavior. Soon they believe their government-sculpted life_style_ truly merits special tax treatment. The dual-income yuppie couple who intended to send their daycare-raised child to Stanford would have been outraged had their Gore tax credit been suddenly wiped off the books and converted into a marginal across-the-board cut in income tax rates that kicked in at a level that would have benefited the manicurist and the auto mechanic as well as the lawyer and the doctor. Congressional Democrats would have decried such a change as a tax cut for the rich. The greatest example of how the Democratic ideology works is the current Social Security system. It brings to perfection the Democratic ideal of making people dependent on government while freezing in place high levels of government taxation and spending. Congressional Democrats will argue against virtually any tax cut that allows people to keep more of their own money because, were the government to take that money instead, it theoretically could use it to vouchsafe the Social Security system and continue to maintain almost the entire elderly population of the nation in a state of government dependence. Some Democrats go so far as to argue that it is wrong to allow parents, as a particular class of Americans, to keep more of their own money-that it is even a disservice to those parents' children-because that money otherwise could be used somehow, somewhere, directly, or indirectly, to support Social Security. When confronted with President Bush's $1.6-trillion largely untargeted tax cut, the renowned Democratic moralist, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, posed his argument in pseudo-Biblical terms, lamenting the entire history of Western Civilization as one big lost tax-raising opportunity. Perhaps we can understand it if I say that $1 billion is $1 per minute since Jesus Christ was born, said Byrd at a Budget Committee hearing. Therefore, $1 trillion would be $1,000 per minute since Jesus Christ is born. . . . So, if that be the case, then $1.6 trillion must be $1,600 per minute, every 60 seconds since Jesus Christ was born. That's a long time, 2000 years. . . . But here we are, talking about a gargantuan tax cut, Byrd continued. And I look at my little granddaughter, my great-granddaughter, and I say what is she going to think of me if I join in this stampede to cut taxes to the tune of $1,600 per minute? Now one day, I have to leave this Senate. When I do, I 'm going to look in the mirror, and I'm going to ask myself of the tax cut: Did you join the stampede? Were you thinking of that little granddaughter? Were you thinking of your grandchildren? Were you thinking of your children? Or were you thinking of yourself and your generation, your time? It may be tempting to conclude that Byrd was really making a personal point, a confession-that he cannot be trusted to use his income to properly benefit his children. But that cannot be the case. He clearly does trusts himself, as a senator, to take money from every other American parent and spend it as he sees fit. It is not that liberal Democrats consider themselves particularly ill-suited as parents, it is that they distrust parenthood, period, especially when government is the alternative. Thus Robert Byrd-who will admit in a congressional hearing that he fears he may well loot his own children of their just desserts-is transformed, simply by walking into the Senate chamber, into the all-knowing legislator who can wisely spend the money of every other parent. In the Democratic vision even the fundamental nature of the parent-child relationship should be altered and controlled by the federal tax code. These Democrats do understand one truth: Taxing and spending is about more than money, it is about power. The more the government taxes and spends, the more it can control our lives. The more the government tailors its taxing and spending to reward those who behave as the government commands them to behave and to punish those who do not, the less free we will be. This is the real test of any change in the tax laws. It is not about money, first. It is about freedom, first.