Where’s Lumpy?

In this US News and World Report piece, Rick Newman writes:

John McCain and Barack Obama both promise that widespread tax cuts will be one major way they’ll revive the economy and help lift consumers’ sagging spirits. They differ, of course, on who should enjoy the largesse. McCain wants to cut estate and corporate income taxes, and extend broad-based tax cuts that were enacted earlier this decade. Obama agrees about extending some of those Bush era tax cuts, while offering lots of other relief to people earning less than $250,000 and raising taxes on the wealthy.

McCain’s and Obama’s fiscal policies are both suspect.  Both favor the redistribution of wealth at the point of the sword; the only thing they disagree on is who benefits, and they seem to be converging politically on that point.  Mr. Newman is right about that, but then he uses that word “largesse.”

American Heritage Dictionary defines “largesse” as “Liberality in bestowing gifts, especially in a lofty or condescending manner.”  It is not “largesse” for the state to reduce the amount of wealth they take from one segment of the population to give to another.  The state creates no wealth and generates no revenue; it has no gifts to give.

Rick Newman is as guilty as the bulk of the American population for mistaking fiscal restraint for largesse.  We speak of the government as if it were some magnanimous jolly Santa Claus, but we forget that the presents he leaves one house were taken from the last one he visited, minus his own cut for sleigh upkeep and for paying off the reindeer union.  When he suggests he might take a little less from us this year, we praise him for his generosity with words like “largesse?”

A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.

-Edward R. Murrow