Where the GOP’s Tax Extremism Comes From
Conservative* leaders like Grover Norquist want to basically eliminate taxes and government
In a party-line vote, Republican Senators have passed a remarkably unpopular tax bill — one that raises taxes on most Americans and lowers them for the very wealthy and corporations. Even with the rosiest projections of supply-side and trickle-down effects, this bill will shrink the size of government revenues by perhaps trillions. And that’s the point.
The religious fervor for cutting government comes in large part from conservative voices who believe that all government is bad. And nobody has made more noise on this topic than Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform.
No one enjoys taxes. But Norquist hates them with a passion that makes me wonder if an IRS agent beat him up as a kid. He’s famous for saying, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And he’s the guy who got nearly every national-level GOP politician to sign a pledge to never raise taxes.
Never.
Not even when, say, we wage a multi-trillion-dollar war. But remember, in the past, presidents of both parties both lowered and raised taxes when the…
