Paul Krugman presents a cogent discussion of tax-cuts and government spending in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. We are not over-taxed as a nation, the wealthy received the preponderance of the Bush tax-cuts, and a huge fiscal crisis is looming.
[T]he coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.
In [tax critic Grover] Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.
But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that’s a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives — whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren’t such a bad thing after all — is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.