Why Can’t We Have Higher Taxes, France Does?

October 25th, 2009 · No Comments

A fellow named James Pettican wrote a column for the St. Petersburg Times titled Bashing Taxes is Popular, But Often Misguided in which he says:

Legendary Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. got it right in an opinion he wrote back in 1904: ” Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

To most politicians, they are the T-word, a word they try to use sparingly and only in the context of their two favorite verbs: cutting and lowering.

With U.S. politicos almost always mentioning taxes in a negative way, it is no wonder that most Americans complain about them. Such complaints fall on mostly deaf ears in the rest of the world, however, as our country’s tax rates are low compared with those of most other developed nations. Sales taxes as a percentage of government revenue are less than 8 percent in the United States while they range into the high teens in Europe.

We have heard the specious “other-countries-do-it-so-we-should” argument from the left in other contexts as well. For example, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) argues that America should have universal health care because other countries have it:

Every other industrialized nation in the world provides universal health care to its citizens. The U.S. is in fact the only industrialized country which does not provide a form of universal health coverage.

It might be useful for Mr. McDermott to recall that at one time everyone thought the world was flat yet that didn’t make it any less round.

Although there may be good substantive reasons for having high taxes, the fact that other countries have them is not one of them. Pettican’s is not an argument based on the merits of high taxes, but rather a cynical appeal to the part of all of us that wishes to fit in. He may not be aware of it, but he is using a form of peer pressure not much different than what operates when a teenager at a party takes a puff from a joint simply because all the other kids have.

No argument touting the beauties of high taxes should be proffered without an honest discussion of how the government has historically spent the taxpayers’ money. When you include the latter with the former, the conversation takes on an entirely different aura.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as: