**Posted by Phineas

All your money! Give it to me! MINE!!!

It was inevitable. Having won a meaningless, crony-rewarding, counterproductive tax increase during troubled economic times that only serves to pander to the class-warfare crowd, the statists and redistributionists in the House, lead by Nancy Pelosi, want more:

Pushing back against the Republicans’ deficit-reduction strategy, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this weekend that more tax revenues – not just spending cuts – must be a part of Congress’s effort to rein in deficits.

Pelosi said the tax hikes in the recent “fiscal-cliff” deal are a start, but don’t go far enough to generate the revenues the government needs to run the country effectively.

“In this legislation we had $620 billion, very significant … changing the high-end tax rate to 39.6 percent. But that is not enough on the revenue side,” Pelosi told CBS’s Bob Schieffer in an interview taped Friday.

Without offering many specifics, the California Democrat said she wants to scour the tax code for unnecessary loopholes and “unfair” benefits that help those – either companies or individuals – who don’t need it.

“Put it all on the table and see what is working,” she said. “Frankly, I’m fairly agnostic about what it could be. … But, you know, if it works for us, if it grows our economy, if it’s something that justifies its existence, it should be there.”

I’m actually not averse to reforming the tax code to eliminate a lot of loopholes and credits that constitute nothing more than subsidies to favored constituents by redistributing money taken from taxpayers. Best of all would be a flat tax at a low rate  that eliminates all such nonsense, or maybe a national sales tax in place of an income tax, so that you’re taxing consumption, not productive behavior or saving. It would be great for genuine economic growth. (But not both together, please! That way lies Europe.)

But, cynical me, I suspect that is not what Nancy wants. No, what she wants, like Rocco in “Key Largo,” is more.  More revenue, more of our money. There’s never enough. And she wants the power that comes with having more money to redistribute, to turn citizens into dependent clients of the State and the Democratic Party. She and her progressive brethren will take the money and then control who gets how much — and if they want to keep getting it, they’ll vote the right way.

The power to distribute money is the power to control.

And that’s really the point of it all, of ObamaCare, of huge deficits and debts, of cries of “fairness,” and of fiscal-cliff games and threats of chaos in the wake of sequestration: to justify ever higher tax rates on us all (1) and gain control over us by gaining control over our money. Nancy wants more.

She wants all of it.

Footnote:
(1) You did notice the shrinking of your latest paycheck, didn’t you?

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)