Not Whether To Tax, But Getting Away With It - Granite Grok

Not Whether To Tax, But Getting Away With It

The Knotty Problem on Capitol Hill, Finding a Way to Raise Taxes Without Losing a Single Vote
The Knotty Problem on Capitol Hill, Finding a Way to Raise Taxes Without Losing a Single Vote
Dr Seuss, Early 1940s
Riffing off Skip’s piece on the gas tax, I happened to walk into a thinly attended local GOP meeting last night – not naming names, because it’s the principle that matters:

The topic under discussion was the recent vote on the gas tax increase, and whether it would have been better to raise gas taxes and take a bite out of passing tourists, or for residents to suck it up in registration fees to keep the state friendly for visitors.

Nobody, NOBODY, in a GOP group (until I walked in) seemed to consider the possibility that taxes should not go up! Once prodded, they wondered aloud whether our roads and bridges were so bad as to warrant this, whether prioritization might be a good idea, or gosh, are all the gas and vehicle taxes actually going toward road maintenance?

And we wonder why we have a problem cutting spending? Do we HAVE to give Maggie’s Marauders a free pass?

About that picture: Who Knew that Dr Seuss was a political satirist? This description from the purveyors of the print:

Between 1941 and 1943, at the height of World War II, Ted Geisel delivered a series of hardhitting editorial cartoons addressing key issues of the day including isolationism, racism and anti-Semitism. In Knotty Problem, Seuss humorously depicts Congress hard at work using plumb bobs,T-squares, surveyors’ transits, scales and drawing compasses as they go about their time-honored tradition of finding a way to raise taxes without losing a single vote.

To [mis]quote our multilingual reader, C.dog: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

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