Sebastian Mallaby Wants to Raise Your Taxes AND Stimulate You!

Loony editorial today by Sebastian Mallaby, in which he advocates for another stimulus AND refers to the 2001 tax cut as "crazy".

Referring to our fiscal situation as "swimming in red ink", Mallaby conveniently forgets that this nation OFTEN fights wars from a deficit posture. Oh yeah, that's right, we're AT WAR. The tax cuts were and are an important way for Americans to keep more of their own money...once we were attacked and had to respond, of course we went into a deficit situation. The answer isn't to tax our way out, it is to GROW our way out (even as fewer resources come to be spent on the war).

I'm sure many of you will say that Iraq didn't attack us; and by that strict measure of whether or not to fight war, I suppose you're right. But our government was repeatedly criticized for "failing to connect the dots" in the run up to 9-11, and the possibility that a man with the desire to use WMD (Bin Laden) would join up with a man with the means to provide WMD (Saddam) is enough for me. Oh you say, but Saddam didn't have WMD. Well, we know that now. But EVERY single reputable intelligence service on the face of the earth believed that he did, and he said and did everything he could to make us think he did. Ancient Chinese saying goes, "Wave toy gun in the face of police man, get shot in the face."

It is time for us to do very little. This is actually one of the great things about being a conservative--doing nothing is often a great thing to do! The government has taken action to shore up financial markets and bring confidence to the system. The dollar is rising. The stock market has stabilized. Housing will solve itself when the correct balance among supply, demand and credit is reached. Will there be pain in the interim? Yes. But at least we don't do stupid and damaging things (like another stimulus, or letting the Bush tax cuts expire) while we wait to see what the impact of what we've ALREADY done is.