Ezra Klein: Yesterday's Revenue Can't Support Tomorrow's America

This is a fascinating piece, from the progressive wonder boy, at the Washington Post.

Klein's statistics all seem fine and dandy. He just comes to the wrong conclusion: that taxes must expand rather than spending contract. It's always that way with lefties. The final solution is to engorge government to such levels that all private activity is snuffed out.

While Klein focuses on the degree of taxation as a percentage of GDP, he doesn't consider that the average tax incidence of the individual is already nearing unsustainable levels. We're nearly taxing individuals in blue states at the level of the most generous Scandinavian welfare states. See: "Top Marginal Tax Rate Will Exceed 50% in California, New York, and Hawaii in 2013." California, following the November election, will boast the nation's highest marginal tax rate of 51.9 percent. It's no surprise that California's been bludgeoned by a massive exodus of businesses from the once-Golden State.

In any case, the Ezra Kleins of the world will never learn, for their ideology is one of no restraints, only the never-reached goal of human equality and the perfect resolution of mankind's material needs (in "tomorrow's America"). It is, in another word, Utopianism.

See Victor Davis Hanson for the reality check, at IBD, "Spending, Not Lack of Revenue, Is Real Problem."