The tax code should be socially & economically neutral & not used to incentivize the allocation of private capital. They can give the collected revenues away to whomever they'd like per the wisdom of their appropriations commitees. Also, I hope they seriously study the practicality of taxing consumption & not income & never both. In the case at hand, erroneously and so-called tax-breaks for Big Oil, the incentives should be repealed for all manufacturers or none. Again, neutrality. To balance the budget, both spending cuts & revenue enhancements are needed & the lionshare of the latter must come from a rising ecomomic tide rather than tax hikes. Spending cannot be based first on society's needs b/c those will always exceed our available governmental resources, which must be defined as a sustainable percent of annual GDP. Needs require, then, some tragic triage decisions. Some always focus on the Goose & some on the eggs. No goose, no eggs! In an ideal world, there would be no coercion needed at all. Government is a necessary evil because we are fallible, flawed, finite. Political statecraft, especially at the federal level, must maintain the public order, best it can. To try to accomplish more than that, especially in a pluralistic society, isn't workable and quickly devolves into the counterproductive, precisely because coercive force encroaches on personal dignity & will demoralize "the governed." The government, then, is to be about the administration of justice, leaving the demands of charity to individual initiatives. Even what have traditionally been called "entitlement" programs are not really in place to administer mercy; rather, they are in place to maintain the public order b/c w/o social security, medicare & medicaid, for example, society could otherwise be brought to the brink of chaos and disorder via outright criminality. That's why it is aptly named "social" and not, rather, "retirement" security. I would not go so far as to say that all can meet their own needs b/c, sometimes, due to bad luck, misfortune and other at-risk situations, even life's basic necessities will remain out of reach. I am also not suggesting that the collective resources of our population are so scarce that maybe even all of our population's basic needs might not be met by them. The nuance is that I am saying that the government is in no position to commandeer those resources that we, thru our selfish habits of consumption, are not otherwise willing to freely share via our individual and nongovernmental charitable initiatives. The Goose would selfishly fly away is the problem, I'm afraid.
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