Coburn: It’s ‘Stupid And Naive’ To Think We Won’t Have Tax Increases | Combining a bit of basic economic common sense and hard political calculus, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said on CSPAN today that it’s “pretty stupid and naive” to think that anti-tax absolutists like activist Grover Norquist will be able to avoid raising taxes forever. Sounding almost progressive, the hard-right senator noted that government revenues are at a 60-year-low and that people are unfairly benefiting from tax expenditures, thus loopholes will have to be closed and more revenue raised. He also made the obvious political calculation that Republicans only control the House, so they should not be dictating terms.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that Republican demands that a deal to raise the debt ceiling include only spending cuts and no tax increases are unrealistic. To bolster his case, he noted that America is already “very low-tax compared to other developed countries”:
It is also true, incidentally, that America is very low-tax compared to other developed countries. So nobody likes to pay taxes, everybody says ‘my taxes are too damn high,’ and they’re right, except that if we want services and the services we want — we want to protect democracy, you have to have men and women who are willing able to go overseas and able to be supplied…I pay my taxes and I get pretty good value for my taxes. I live in the greatest democracy in the world.
It’s true that America is a very low-tax country. Revenues are currently at a 60 year low, and “total revenue as a share of gross domestic product has now been under 15 percent for three straight years — the first time that has happened since before World War II.” Revenue in the U.S. is 25 percent below the OECD average, while U.S. corporations are taxed significantly less than their foreign rivals.