I Don't Want to Pay For It

Jonah Goldberg expresses what I think a lot of us are thinking about the Obama plans:

I Don't Want To Pay For It

That is, by far, my driving attitude in all of this. I just don't want to pay for it. It's not that I don't want government to do nice things for deserving people in certain circumstances. It's not necessarily that I'm hostile to this group of beneficiaries or that (though I am in fact hostile to some). It's that I think most of Obama's ideas will not work, will be a waste of money and will hurt the economy. And, flatly, I don't want to pay for it. I don't want to break the law. I don't want pull a Geithner or a Daschle or anything like that. But I don't want to pay for it. I will look for every means within the boundaries of the law to minimize what I pay in taxes and I make no apologies for that whatsoever.

Precisely.

Steve Hayward adds his strategy:

Amen, brother Jonah. I don't want to pay for this stuff either. I was sympathetic to Ben Stein's argument during GW Bush that we should have an income tax surcharge on the wealthy to pay for the war, and I'd have gladly paid such a surtax for that cause. But not this explosion of government.

Options: I've started buying municipal bonds, which I never thought I'd do until. . . well, never, actually. Good ones right now are an attractive buy on the merits, but the added bonus of sealing off the income from Obama makes it all the nicer. But my bigger idea is to go all Randian and literally go on strike (and I've never really been much of a Rand fan, by the way—Whittaker Chambers had her down right). I'm going to start converting income opportunities into more leisure by deliberately reducing my income. Already between federal and state income taxes, self-employment taxes, the AMT, and phased-out dependent deductions as income rises, I'm at a marginal rate of about 50% on my last dollars earned from writing or anything else. So it will pay to keep below Obama's high income threshold. I suspect a lot of self-employed people will make similar calculations and adjustments, and the revenue yield will be far below what Obama's people project. Welcome to Europe.

Higher taxes will equal less productivity which in turn will equal lower tax revenues.