AARP editor’s dream kids are “not selfish” but eager to tax
Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:32AM “I mean that there is no way to disarm any man,” said Dr. Ferris, “except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt…If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it—we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself.” –Atlas Shrugged, pg. 548
What would a group of students attending a pricey private college in Florida do about the deficit? For one thing the editor said they would not be “selfish.” For another, they’d be glad to levy new taxes, even though the taxes “would affect them disproportionately.”
The students' new taxes would include a carbon tax, higher gas taxes and a new 5 percent sales tax even if the latter “could drive the cost of a Big Mac sky-high.”
AARP Bulletin editor Jim Toedtman met these fiscal wonder kids during one of his spring “teaching and listening” excursions at Flagler College in St. Augustine. Toedtman was so inspired he penned an editorial about the young progressives in the May issue of the Bulletin.
Toedtman noted the bipartisan failures in Washington, claiming they “all but shut down the federal government” and “left the annual budget process in a shambles.”
That shambles, it must be pointed out, came about as a direct result of Democrats in Congress—they simply couldn’t find time to prepare a budget although they did make time to set world records for spending US tax dollars.
Toedtman said he challenged his political science and communications students to “rein in federal spending…” Students came up with their ideas to cut spending and apparently to raise revenue. The editor gave the impression their ideas are novel when in fact they’re the same ideas that have led us to where we are today.
For instance, the college kids didn’t want to cut education although the federal bureaucracy we call the Dept. of Education is probably the most worthless agency in the history of the country. You could cut the budget by half, block up the rest into direct-to-states grants and we would never even know the department was gone.
Aside from that, Toedtman said his kids “made sizable defense cuts, others closed tax loopholes and added or raised taxes, including higher gasoline taxes and a new 5 percent sales tax…”
In other words, most of those students will probably grow up to be tax and spend Democrats.
That may be new to Toedtman, but it’s old news to the rest of us. The editor quoted one student who said, “In such depressing economic times, we must all make sacrifices and share in the responsibility.”
The students would’ve been better served had they read a couple books—Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and F. A. Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ for example.
As for the proposed taxes affecting the students “disproportionately,” that’s a hard one for me to swallow. How many of those college kids paid income taxes last year, I wonder?
(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Mary 9, 2011)
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Reader Comments (2)
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