Читать книгу A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom - Grover Norquist Glenn - Страница 10

So, how do we strengthen our team? How do we identify more people whose votes and political activities lead towards liberty, and how do we reduce the number of people who view the state as that mechanism whereby they get their hands on other people’s stuff, and other people’s lives?

Step one, I always thought, was limiting taxation. That is why I run Americans for Tax Reform. We created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that many candidates sign. It is a written, witnessed pledge to their constituents that they will never vote to raise taxes. The goal of that pledge is to make it difficult for Congress to ever raise taxes because then, and only then, can you begin to have a conversation about reducing spending. Once you remove the tax hike option then you may have an opportunity to focus on reforming government to cost less.

We learned the importance of holding the line against taxes in two painful failures by Republican presidents Reagan and Bush 41. In 1982, the Democrat party said to Reagan: ‘We promise to cut spending by three dollars if you agree to raise taxes by one dollar.’ A three-to-one ratio was agreed. Reagan faced a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate that was pre-Reagan in its thinking. So Reagan was kind of alone. Just as Margaret Thatcher may have been the only Thatcherite in her own government at first, Reagan was the only Reaganite in Washington for quite some time. He took that bad deal. At the end of the day, taxes were raised and spending was not reduced.

This happened eight years later, to George Bush senior. They offered him two dollars of imaginary spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases. Spending didn’t get cut but taxes did get raised. The other team raises taxes to spend the money; they don’t raise taxes for some other purpose, so if you give them the tax increases, they will spend the resources.

In 1994, Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate and all but a handful signed and kept the pledge to never raise taxes. Republicans learned from painful failure that tax hikes only feed big government and strengthen the party of big government in the United States: the Democrats.

So the Reagan Republican Party became the party that would never raise your taxes. But opposing tax increases is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve limited government.