Another report from the front lines of socialist-land from the student hiding behind the “pixilated burqa of on-line anonymity”
I love the “logic” of the majority of my fellow students. They “hate” taxes and love big government programs. Hypocritical? Yes, but it gets so much better than it might appear at first glance.
One tax they hate the most is the sales tax on text books. Now a 3.7%+ tax can add a bit to the bill when an average bill is over $200. While understandable, the student legislature has a weird solution to this problem: ban sales taxes on campus.
Now while I love the thought of banning taxes all together (I am a Libertarian after all), I find it hypocritical that they also call for big government. If they (the supporters of this big government) don’t pay for it, then who do they think will? The hypocrisy is unbelievable. You pay for what you advocate.
These student bureaucrats, oh I am sorry student legislators, apparently have some problem with sales taxes. I hardly doubt that it is the same problem I have. My problem is that it takes money from people and spends it on horrid and wasteful government programs that violate the very nature of the US Constitution. (This is true with me of all taxes.) Unlike me, their problem is that sales taxes are more visible to them than payroll taxes and income taxes (they’re wards of Mummy and Pappy and don’t need jobs). In my opinion, sales taxes are the best of all the evil taxes available. As sales taxes are the least unfair because it is harder for the politicians to politicize them. With income taxes they can change the rates so that the rich get screwed and the poor get helped. That is exactly what we have right now in America (the majority of taxpayers are rich paying for the poor – the minority of people paying for the majority of people because of the tax structure). The student legislatures (who really dislike me, by the way) really do not care about the payroll taxes or other forms of income taxes that their fellow working students (the minority of students need you be told) have to pay
Let us pretend for a minute that I am mistaken: they just dislike all taxes, not just the visible ones. Assuming that this is true, and it is not, they are clearly fighting the wrong battle. Want to reduce taxes? First reduce the government, then taxes will follow as spending will decrease then all politicians will have nothing left to do with the money except return it. However, I highly doubt that this is what they think, as they suffer from the liberal’s contagious cancer that encourages a pro-tax bias. There are two other reasons why I know this is not the case. First, they want to eradicate taxes in just the bookstore, not in nearby restaurants and stores. Dare I say that this may be, in some twisted way, a political move of these future bureaucrats?
I also know this because they like to see the government doing things: education, health care, energy, environmental protection, euro-creation, food distribution, retirement provisions, and whatever else. In other words, they have no problem with people paying 100% taxes, if that is what it takes to have these utopia-based government programs. Furthermore, they dislike any mention of broad scoping tax cuts, even the petty cuts proposed by the president and the governor of whatever state I happen to be in.
The idea of anti-taxes is not bad, but that is clearly not what they really believe. They just want to save their political hides by not having on campus taxes. Like all politicians, these student politicians also see the need to eradicate visible taxes from those they represent. At least if their hearts were really against taxes I may not be so displeased with their decision, but as it stands, these politicians are operating at the same level of intelligence as Tom Daschle and Karl Marx.
