US: Sen. Marco Rubio Seeks New Taxpayers, Not New Taxes

US: Sen. Marco Rubio Seeks New Taxpayers, Not New Taxes – by Ralph Benko

Freshman U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sums it up perfectly. The taxes the Democrats want would, if enacted, fund just 10 days of the deficit. Rubio: “Let’s not be doctrinaire; let’s not be blindly ideological. Let’s look at this from a common sense perspective, this idea that all these millionaires and billionaires, if they just paid more taxes, these problems would be solved. Let’s analyze it. This is all about math….

First of all, if you taxed these people at 100% … it still doesn’t solve the debt. Not only does that not solve the debt problem, but I looked at a host of other … tax increases being proposed by our colleagues in the Democratic Party and the president to solve the debt problem. And you add them all up … the jet airplanes, the oil companies, all of the other things they talk about — you put them all together in one big batch, and you know what it does? It basically deals with nine days and 23 hours worth of deficit spending. …. Let’s round it off. … It buys them 10 days of deficit spending reduction.”

Then Rubio turns his attention to the core issue: “We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers.” He goes on: “That is the real face of unemployment in America, of people that are hurting. And our job here is to do everything we can to make it easier for them to find a job, not harder. And I think that’s what we have to do when it comes to a balanced approach and when we talk about revenue.

We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. And then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. And that’s what we should be focused on, and that’s what we’re not focused on.

So you look at all these taxes that are being proposed, and here’s what I say. I say we should analyze every single one of them through the lens of job creation, issue number one in America.”

The Democrats are beginning to experience something very close to a blind panic. They have spent money their predecessors could only dream about … to create jobs. What do they have to show for it? 9.2% unemployment. Will that get better? Nobody knows. But even if conditions improve cyclically it’s a shameful record to have to run on, or from.

The left understandably is getting twitchy about its horrible performance in the aftermath of glittering election promises and trillions in bailouts and deficit spending. We mere voters understandably cast a skeptical eye on their arguments that they need(ed) even greater government spending and more gargantuan deficits to revive the economy. Sounds tinny.

The most elegant spokesman for that viewpoint, Paul Krugman, stands against the “big push on not just to downsize government, but to convert federal programs like Medicaid and unemployment insurance into block grants, more or less ensuring that they will be cut rather than expanding in a slump.” But he stands, as noted in a recent, rather poignant, New York Magazine profile, almost alone. “Paul Krugman is a lonely man. That he is comfortable in his solitude, that he emphasizes its virtues, that his intelligence gives it a poetic gloss, none of this diminishes the poignancy of his isolation.”

But Krugman’s attack on us also delivers a ray of sunshine that the Republicans really are beginning to come up with not just growth rhetoric but a credible growth recipe.

Krugman states, “Gold bugs have taken over the GOP.” Krugman recoils, like a vampire before a garland of garlic, before this plain fact. Gold portends to restrain government spending (to what can be taxed and borrowed, rather than printed), a characteristic which horrifies the Democrats but thrills the Tea Party and conservatives. In addition to its constraining the ability of the government to spend — “deficits without tears,” as economist Jacques Rueff characterized it — it is a recipe for economic growth, for job creation. The gold standard represents the most significant — and potentially most dynamic — unfinished part of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp’s economic growth agenda.

Rubio: “We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers…..” How to get them? Gold, whose advantages recently were praised by Prof. Robert Mundell as that it is “nobody’s liability and it can’t be printed… it has a strength and confidence that people trust,” is neither doctrinaire nor ideological. Gold is property of neither the left nor the right but of the people.

Memo to the GOP: In putting policy proposals “through the lens of job creation” it should be remembered that a gold-defined dollar equals jobs.