This CF&P video is nearly 10 years old, so some of the numbers are outdated, but the seven reasons to reject tax increases are still very relevant.
I’m recycling the video because the battle over tax increases is becoming more heated.
Indeed, depending on what happens in November, we may be fighting against major tax-hike proposals in less than one year.
Every single candidate seeking the Democratic nomination (such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, etc) wants Washington to have much more of our money.
And there are plenty of cheerleaders for a bigger welfare state who favor this outcome. Some of them urge class-warfare tax increases. Other admit that lower-income and middle-class people will need to be pillaged to finance bigger government.
The one unifying principle on the left, as illustrated by this column for The Week by Paul Waldman, is the belief that Americans are under-taxed.
…as an American, when it comes to taxes you’ve got it easy. …we pay much lower taxes than most of our peer countries. In the United States, our tax-to-GDP ratio is about 26 percent, far below the 34 percent average of the advanced economies in the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and drastically less than some European countries (Denmark tops the list at 46 percent). …We have chosen — whether we did it consciously or not — to create a system that makes it easier for a small number of people to get super-rich, but also makes life more cruel and difficult for everyone else. …We could all pay more, and in return get more from government than we’re getting now. We just have to decide to do it.
This is a very weak argument since a cursory investigation quickly reveals that Americans have much higher living standards than people in other developed nations.
That’s a good thing, not a “cruel and difficult” consequence, 
though I’m not surprised that folks on the left are impervious to real-world evidence.
However, I am surprised when otherwise sensible people throw in the towel and say it’s time to surrender on the issue of taxes.
The latest example is James Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute.
Here’s some of what he wrote on the topic.
…the GOP commitment, implied and explicit at the same time, to never, ever support a net tax increase, under any circumstance, is making sensible lawmaking far more difficult than it should be. It’s time to break free of this counterproductive constraint. …The no tax hike position got its start in the 1986 tax reform effort.
Several business and policy advocacy organizations began asking members of the House and Senate, as well as candidates for seats in those chambers, to sign a pledge opposing a net increase in income tax rates. …The pledge became politically salient in 1992, when then President George H.W. Bush lost his bid for reelection. His loss is widely assumed to have been caused, at least in part, by his acceptance of a large tax hike…after having pledged never to increase taxes… Retaining the GOP’s absolutist position on taxes might be defensible if the party were advancing an agenda that demonstrated it could govern responsibly without new revenue. Unfortunately, Republicans have proved beyond all doubt that they have no such agenda. In fact, the party has gladly gone along with successive bipartisan deals that increased federal spending by hundreds of billions.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jim is theoretically wrong.
Heck, even I offered up three scenarios where a tax increase could be an acceptable price in order to achieve much-needed spending reforms. And I’ll even add a fourth scenario by admitting that I would trade a modest tax increase for a Swiss-style spending cap.
But every one of my options is a meaningless fantasy.
In the real world, those acceptable scenarios are not part of the discussion. Instead, two very bad things inevitably happen when tax increases are on the table.
- The automatic default assumption is that tax increases should be 50 percent of any budget deal. That’s bad news, but the worse news is that the other 50 percent of the budget deal isn’t even genuine spending cuts.
Instead, all we get is reductions (often illusory or transitory) in previously planned increases. The net result is bigger government (and it’s even worse in Europe!). This is why every budget deal in recent history has backfired – except the one that cut taxes in 1997. - Budget deals result in the worst types of tax increases for the simple reason that budget deals get judged by their impact on “distribution tables.” And since the make-believe spending cuts ostensibly will reduce benefits for lower-income and middle-class people, the crowd in Washington demands that the tax increases should target investors, entrepreneurs, business owners, and others with above-average incomes. Yet these are the tax hikes that disproportionately hinder growth.
The bottom line is that tax increases should be a no-go zone. If Washington gets more of our money, that will “feed the beast.”
At the risk of under-statement, Grover Norquist’s no-tax-hike pledge is good policy (and good politics for the GOP). Americans for Tax Reform should double down in its opposition to tax increases.
P.S. There’s great wisdom on tax policy from these four presidents.
