Recently my interests have gravitated to subjects not pertinent to this site, so I have only been making occasional visits lately, but last week I find that BGlover and MichaelEmmanuel have registered views on best practices for a stimulus package for the economy. Both feel an income tax suspension, for a limited time, as opposed to a marginal rate decrease, is a better step the government could take to address financial difficulties and stimulate the economy. At first blush their proposal has appeal, but for me, upon consideration, ends up more delicious than nutritious.

Often I think I am in Big Brother's wonderland already. History is rewritten with such audacity I sometimes doubt my own memory. I may possibly be in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but I distinctly remember the economic wisdom of the 1980's, when Japan was the economic behemoth, proclaiming the problem with Americans was that we didn't save enough. Credit, aka, living beyond our means in crass materialistic stupor, as opposed the personal frugality of the average Japanese, was the metaphor for their rise and our decline. Now Washington proposes to either take less or give back more of our money with the proviso that we do our patriotic duty and spend it like crazy. Some pundits and contemporary sages have even expressed fear, "fear" mind you, that skittish Americans might interpret the recent economic convolutions as a caution to save rather than spend. BGlover and MichaelEmmanuel are apparently among Big Brother's second generation, because they obviously were never instructed from the ancient text I reference.

On a practical level, although as a rule of thumb, I am all for limiting government appropriation of the fruits of labor to its barest necessity; I don't see a temporary suspension of the income tax as more than a shot of methadone to a longtime heroin addict: you've stopped the pain and the craving, for as long as the effect lasts. If our problem is the debt people have accumulated operating under the restraints of their net pay, one might think something else must change in addition to their net pay. Perhaps Thoreau was correct when he opined that "a man is wealthy is proportion to the things he can afford to do without". Our economic turmoil is not the result of any lack of commercial transactions, but rather from the harmful reality that credit transactions have become the rule rather than the exception. The increasingly convenient instruments speeding up the transfer of goods from producers to consumers have made virtually all buying "impulse" buying, with too little reflection on ultimate costs, need, utility or value. An income tax suspension without the requisite reduction in profligate materialism and thoughtless consumerism might cause an exacerbation of the underlying problem, and increased commercial activity will be offset, and likely outstripped, by rising and ultimately debilitating personal debt. Another consideration is the predictable inflation and rising cost of living that will result when supply competes with the new artificially stimulated demand, and together will inevitably be that much more burdensome when normal taxation resumes and politicians politic to replace, restore, and create programs and pork pretermitted during the interregnum.

It is quite a conundrum for me. As opposed as I am to the government taking as much as it does, I am equally wary of the repercussions of giving it all back at once. That sixty inch plasma TV MichaelEmmanuel desires probably will not be purchased with the windfall from one, three, or six tax free paychecks. It will likely be bought with credit; and when encumbered with its interest rate and 700 watts per hour energy use, may in real economic terms, turn out to be the low hanging, attractive fruit of an insidiously poisonous tree. A significant portion of the fault, and the dangers, may not be in our taxes, but in ourselves.