BuckeyeBlog

Barack Obama came into office with only one substantive achievement, the promotion of transparency and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, with its resultant interactive database. By itself, it is impressive but only a small part of the picture. The truly important thing was its demonstration of the principle and the raising of transparency’s profile.

To get real transparency, though, you’ve got to get the basics and the fundamentals down. That means we have to have standards for facts, something that reasonable people can agree on but still have their philosophical disagreements.

So here’s a big one: “Democrats say tax cuts represent one-third of hte overall stimulus package, not a huge difference from Obama’s original goal of 40 percent. But congressional budget analysts count nearly $100 million of these measures as spending because they are credits going to people who don’t pay taxes.”

That’s right. Welfare does not become tax policy because public relations decides it’ll sell better. You want transparency, you must have honest accounting. Obama fails big time.

But blame too all the Republicans who buy into the “earned income tax credit.” Once you buy into that nonsense, all government spending becomes tax cuts. Doubtless there is a large population of people like Obama and Sunstein who actually believe that, because they think your property and your rights do not exist independently of government. Under the standard of the EITC, we may as well count all of Medicare, Social Security, GM bailouts and pretty much everything as a tax cut. That means we’re not taxed at all; government is stuffing our pockets so full of cash that we’re all living on the Riveria (which soon enough will be true–except it’ll be a 1978 Buick Riviera hulk under an overpass).

But for anyone who thinks they own their house, or believes in individual freedom, it’s quite the opposite. Government is a damn poor tool to do anything except coerce people, and just because we need to use it sometimes, does not justify using it for everything.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Transparent Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.