Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Rasmussen today:

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters nationwide now expect their own taxes to go up during the Obama years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just nine percent (9%) expect their own taxes to go down.

Given how many people pay no income tax (I’ve heard figures around half, which is why it’s so easy to get support for increasing income tax: the half that do not pay tax vote to increase the tax on the other half that do!), it’s … interesting that so many people expect their tax to go up.

Granted, Rasmussen polls likely voters, not all adults or even registered voters, which probably means higher percentage of people polled by Rasmussen is likely to be paying tax, compared to the general population. But, even so, even the people in the lowest income bracket must be expecting some sort of tax increase to get that sort of poll results.

Well, let’s just hope that they are wrong. Or that they were thinking of increased taxes like cigarette tax (raised earlier this year) or that they have in mind things like VAT that Pelosi and her minions are thinking of (um, not that VAT is any better than increased income tax).

I live a depressing life of a conservative, trapped in a liberal den: college—or, worse yet, UC Berkeley. I am occasionally delighted to find that some of the people closest to me share my conservative ideals and oppose collectivism in all its forms—including communism and the liberal fascism. But, more often, I am distressed that some people I care about are, well, liberals.

It is my hope that some of these people consider themselves liberals not willfully and consciously, but because they haven’t given the matter a good deal of thought—and because many people who had access to their malleable minds—i.e. teachers and professors—were liberals and didn’t have the sense not to corrupt the youth.

In this hope, I write here how I became a conservative. Perhaps some will see the validity of my point, and why, for the good of the greater whole, conservatism is a better philosophy than liberalism.

To be completely frank, I have not seriously considered my political identity until, well, until my junior or senior year in college. But I think a couple experiences in my youth laid the foundation for future decisions and thoughts. The first was a conversation with my youth pastor. It happened so long ago that all I remember now are, well, the conversation took place either when I was a sophomore or a junior in high school, and it took place when he was giving me a ride home from some church event. I don’t even remember why the topic came up, but he described the difference between Democrats and Republicans (and incidentally, why he’s a Republican): Democrats want to fix the society’s every problem with more government programs (and more taxes), and Republicans want to leave it to individuals (as well as their money). I don’t know if this made any sense to me back then, but this description—and it is a true description, I doubt even the hardcore liberal would dispute this characterization—was somehow impressed on my mind.

Then the other thing was the high school (well, it was AP) economics courses. I took both the microeconomics and macroeconomics. The one thing that laid the foundation for my conservative leaning was probably the effect of taxes covered in microeconomics course—how the tax, regardless of how it is levied, will be distributed according to elasticity of demand or supply curve, and how it will always result in dead weight, i.e. lost productivity. The macroeconomics course wasn’t so favorable to conservatives: it bashed Reagan’s supply-side economics and tax cuts as “Reaganomics” and offered very little criticism of Keynesians—not that I understand these topics fully now, given that I had no formal economics education since then.

Well, it looks like it will take rather long to finish this story, so I’ll just close for now with this thought: if you want to decide whether you are a conservative or a liberal, focus on this one issue: taxes. Are you willing to pay higher tax to benefit someone else—someone else that you do not know—or would you rather donate that same money to charity (or not at all)? If you choose the former, you may be a liberal. I would like to convince you that taxes are bad, even when the intentions are good, but, well, each to his own. If you choose the latter, you might be a conservative—please keep an open mind. Watch out for media and academic biases (these are fields that tilt heavily to the left, with notable exceptions like talk radio and some economists), trust your own logic above anything else, and verify all supposed facts with multiple sources.

A report from a nobody claims (via Now! Hampshire)

Franklin was chosen for the report because it has the longest history in the state with a spending cap, said Gottlob, who is the principal of PolEcon Research of Dover and who considers himself a fiscal conservative. The report and its conclusion were meant to be non-political, although he acknowledged that the subject matter is inherently political.

“The expenditure cap in place in Franklin for nearly two decades has clearly resulted in lower levels of local government expenditures than comparable communities in New Hampshire,” the report began, adding that “the lower level of property tax-supported spending in Franklin is largely the result of lower spending on education, in part, because Franklin receives more state education aid per pupil than almost any other city in New Hampshire except Berlin.

How is the quality of education measured in the dollar amount of education spending? If I take a stack of $100 bills and set them on fire, in the name of education, and I make sure that it is entered as education spending in the accounting books, have I benefited the education system, or have I just burned money (and broken federal laws about not burning money)?

The excerpts from this utterly incomprehensible report continues with similar nonsense, such as that tax caps are “a race to the bottom”. I think I like that race to the bottom. As a resident of California, I would hope that Californian legislators would look at the outflow of their population and start offering more competitive local tax rates. I mean, it would be too late for me, but perhaps someone else will decide not to move out of California if the sales tax were, for one, no longer at the level of tithing.

I mean, are you better off with WalMart moving into your town—putting a downward pressure on price of everything—or with Starbucks moving into your town—putting upward pressure on price of coffee and increasing the supply of elitist assholes? How could it be worse for people to keep more of their own money? Are you hurt by the fact that you weren’t robbed at gunpoint today?

For what it’s worth, the residents of city of Franklin also do not comprehend this report:

The people of Franklin, said Merrifield, “are the best judge of the impact of the tax cap and they have lived with this the longest and I think that everybody in our community would say that we’re better off than before we adopted the tax cap.”

He said Franklin voters “have had numerous opportunities to remove the tax cap or alter it to allow for greater spending and the voters have routinely sided with the strictest interpretation. If we were to hold a referendum on this measure today, I would be very surprised to see it overturned.”

Remember this when some other sophist or tax-supported academic tries to tell you that more tax is good: the greatest accomplishments in this country, such as the invention of light bulb and the invention of automobile, happened at a time when there was zero (peacetime) federal income tax and very low local taxes. If we could do that with so little taxes, then less tax cannot possibly be so bad.

PJTV has a “generational theft calculator” that calculates how much your share of the burden will be for a government program, since the politicians don’t do a good job of telling you how much you will personally be paying—what comes out (as hand-out) must get taxed, right?