The Tooth Fairy Pays For Everything

NY Times columnist Tom Friedman, apparently recovering well in his return to sanity, discusses the administration's kneejerk aversion to taxes... even to pay for the things they support the most.

Speaking on a recent (and failed) Democratic effort to use raising the idea of a 'war tax' to highlight the fiscal irresponsibility of our mess overseas, Friedman writes-

It is now 'fiscally irresponsible' to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow...

...The [larger] question is, can we pay for [the war] and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.

We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow.

Personally, I see this less as a celebration of the joy of taxes (fun for the whole family!) than a simple call to getting our national priorities back in order. A radical concept, I know.

(On a related note, Kevin Drum looks at the facts/fictions of U.S. tax policy.)

I wonder what more needs to happen to us before there's enough national will to turn our priorities back around? A recession? A couple more bridges collapsing, or cities swimming underwater? The black plague? Your guess is as good as mine, folks.