Pelosi really does believe that all the money is hers
**Posted by Phineas
Well, the government’s, but you just know that, deep down inside, she sees herself as synonymous with the government — l’Etat c’est Nancy!
Bryan Preston noted this interesting bit of progressive logic while the Minority Leader was talking about reducing government spending:
“Tax cuts are spending.”
“Our whole budget is what $3.5 trillion,” Pelosi said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “So, when we talk about reducing spending, we certainly must, and we certainly have–$1.6 trillion in the previous Congress, $1.2 of it in the Budget Control Act.
“But spending is also related to tax cuts,” said Pelosi. Tax cuts are spending. Tax expenditures, they are called. Subsidies for big oil, subsidies to send jobs overseas, breaks to send jobs overseas, breaks for corporate jets. They are called tax expenditures. Spending money on tax breaks.
“And that’s the spending that we must curtail as well,” she said.
Preston is right: the only way this logic works, the only way a tax cut can be intellectually considered a government expenditure, is if all money is the government’s in the first place. Then it would make sense: by lowering tax rates, the government spends money it otherwise would have had, by letting the people keep more. It is also the government’s right —superior to that of the people— to decide how the money is expended, because it’s their property, anyway.
And it’s an idea utterly alien to everything this nation was founded on.
As I wrote a couple of months ago, when Pelosi said something similar:
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.
That’s what’s at the heart of the repeated bleatings from progressives about “more revenue.” Forget “fairness,” at least as it’s understood in the real world.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)