Parker: Just Another Welfare State Scam

Star Parker

Townhall - Last year a one year cut in the payroll taxes that working Americans pay to finance Social Security was enacted in the name of so-called economic “stimulus.” But, like the rest of the economic stimuli that have come from Washington over the last three years, the only thing that has been stimulated is the growing hole of national debt into which we sink deeper and deeper. But now, not without surprise, our president and his Democrat colleagues want to continue, and possibly expand, this payroll tax holiday despite its obvious failure.
But wait a second. Failure is a matter of definition. If the point was helping get our economy back on the road to growth and prosperity, the payroll tax holiday has been a failure. But if the point of the payroll tax holiday is not to reduce government interference in our lives but to keep it, grow it, and strengthen the decided movement of the last three years to turn our nation into a welfare state plantation, it’s a great idea. And that is really what is going on here and why President Obama and his Democrat colleagues on Capitol Hill love the idea.

Unlike our income taxes that government takes for general revenue and unspecified spending, the payroll tax is earmarked and specified. It pays for Social Security. A cut in income taxes, even if not accompanied with an equivalent cut in government spending, puts the pressure for such cuts in place and carries with it the prospect of reduction of government interference in our lives. But there is no such possibility with the payroll tax. When the tax was reduced “temporarily” last year from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, were working Americans asked to agree to an equivalent cut in their Social Security benefits that that payroll tax pays for?  Of course not. Read full column here: News New Mexico

Parker: Just Another Welfare State Scam