Woah. It's nice to Ross Douthat embrace progressive principles:
This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington's web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as "family farms" and "clean energy" firms that aren't energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don't need the money and boondoggles that wouldn't exist without government favoritism....
All of this ought to be grist for a kind of "small-government egalitarianism," in the economist Edward Glaeser's useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington's wasteful spending on the well-connected....conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn't from the successful to the poor. It's from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.
The Corner's Ramesh Ponnuru adds, "a reform that made the federal government more redistributive, but smaller and more efficient, would be worthwhile."
Uh, yes, it would. And you can kiss goodbye those cushy box seats in a conservative think tank they were warming for you fellas.
Seriously, this is essentially what I was ranting about the other day. Douthat does try to bring his argument back to conservative talking points now and then -- for example, he does rail against liberals' inclination to want to raise taxes on the rich, although I'd argue that we want to level taxes on the rich, simply ensuring that they pay the tax rates assigned to them. No loopholes, no tax havens, and their income taxed at the same rates as, say, mine.
In any case, it's nice to see conservatives understand that income inequality exists, and that our economic system unfairly favors the wealthy. Usually do conservatives not only care (if they recognize this unfairness), they do everything they can to rig the system for the rich. |
