Who taxes and spends?

Ray Lashley
Grand Junction
May 9, 2008

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    I found a letter in a local paper, extolling the virtues of the so-called “Fair Tax,” very interesting. In his first paragraph, the writer ridiculed as “childish” the very idea that the Republicans might spend more than the Democrats. If he referred only to tax money, as in “Tax-and-spend-Democrats,” I’d have been forced to agree with that narrowed-down meaning, but I'd still have had to point to TOTAL spending and compare the “Tax-and-spend-Democrats” to the “Borrow-and-spend-Republicans.” When our present Republican administration took the reins in ‘01 they inherited from the Democrats the lowest national debt in recent history and, in six short years, rather than pay-as-we-go taxing, they elected borrow-and-spend financing, running a war on credit and the national debt past its all-time total to some EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS. Credit card financing at the national level?!

    Seems to me that even though the Republicans might claim a lower tax-and-spend title they should also claim that for free-style spending and outstanding overall debt growth for the American Taxpayer they remain the All Time Champeens!

    By the way, I have a copy of the book, “Free Tax,” which is 196 pages long with just under seven pages devoted to explaining how it works. All the rest appears to be primarily “pitch-man” hype without much attention to such small details as defining who deals with the flood of trillions of dollars from tens of millions of sources.