Tax cuts: A good first step

Yesterday, Americans voted into office many new legislators who will shape American domestic and foreign policy for the next few years. Since this column is written before the election results have been finalized, it will not contain any specific reactions to the outcomes of particular races or potential power shifts in either house of Congress.

It will address, however, the enormous task that is ahead of the newly elected Congress. The nation is at a pivotal point in our history and our economy remains at the forefront of American politics.

The president is presiding over an economy with amazingly low unemployment combined with record-setting stock market. Much of this economic prosperity can be attributed to Bush’s tax cuts of 2001. By reducing the tax burden on every American, the president has lifted the entire country out of the post Sept. 11 recession and into an era of enormous economic prosperity.

These tax cuts are great, but they are only half of the solution. They do not begin to address the broader problem of the size of government. The proper role of government has been at the forefront of political debate for centuries. It comes down to the belief that individuals should be free to make their own decisions, or that government can better decide for them.

Our Founding Fathers clearly resented the overbearing tyranny of England. They believed that individuals, afforded certain unalienable rights, should be free from the oppressive reaches of government.

Following a minimalist approach to government, America rose from primitive British colonies to the world’s preeminent industrial power by the 20th century. During that time, American government remained much as the framers of the constitution envisioned it. There was a small federal government with a miniscule tax burden and a focus on domestic trade and transportation issues.

Early in the 20th century, there was an international push towards bigger governments and America was quick to follow. Our politicians enacted a federal income tax for the first time in 1913 at rates from 1 to 7 percent. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt added the “New Deal” containing dozens of governmental programs including the Social Security Administration among many others. Medicare and Medicaid soon followed accompanied by a myriad of others when Lyndon B. Johnson tacked on the “Great Society” initiatives in the ’70s.

At the core, many of these programs are designed to force Americans into certain actions which the government thinks is for the greater good. Politicians found something that is good for an individual to do, like saving for retirement, and then forced all Americans into a single, wasteful government bureaucracy to enforce it. Social Security has now become a huge drain on our economy as costs continue to rise and benefits continue to shrink. Now our generation is told not to count on Social Security at all and create our own private savings accounts, in addition to the money we are forced to pay in to Social Security, if we want to survive retirement.

The same incompetence is true for many other government programs as bureaucrats continue to assume that Americans need their help to survive.

Gone are the ideals of noble, self-reliant American individuals. Government has claimed more and more of the property of hardworking Americans and forced them into a redistribution of their hard-earned wealth under the altruistic banner of the greater good. We now have an income tax burden of 10 to 35 percent which, sadly, is better than most of the world and even better than we were just 10 years ago under former President Bill Clinton.

Tax cuts are a great thing and go a long way to help ordinary Americans but we need to take the next step. We need to reform or eliminate government programs that no longer fulfill their purpose and return America to its original conception: a nation free from the oppression of tyrannical government.

That is the chore of these and every other politician elected in the United States. We need them to repeal the failing policies of the early 1900s and restructure America based on our original principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Matt Bushman is a civil engineering senior and Mustang Daily political columnist.

He maintains an open dialogue with readers about this column and all previous columns in the forum section of the Mustang Daily Web site.