The election is less than a year away and the field of candidates soon will become more clear as primary season nears.  At this point the main issues that will effect this electoral cycle are not the same as they have been in the past several; namely the War on Terror does not figure to be a central issue (primarily because we are winning in Iraq).  It appears more clearly that this election is going to be about the future of the country, as just about everybody seems to be more than willing to part ways with George W. Bush.   As such the two major issues which are likely to dominate the debate are: illegal immigration and taxes.  I have addressed the former in a previous posting and am likely to expound upon it further in the future.  However, today I would like to address the other crucial issue.
    The best way to deal with this is to start with the basics.  Taxes are a necessary evil because governments cannot function without them.  The building of roads and highways, the functioning of post offices and license bureaus (such as they are), the organization of police forces and firefighters and all the rest of government agencies that exist (and I think prudently) on the local and state levels.  Federal taxation is another matter.  The constitution provides for the federal government to levy taxes for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a military force.  That is about all the constitution says about federal taxation.  However, ever since FDR gave us the New Deal, the federal government has taken on a much, much larger role in the funding of services and taxes have been increased to cover the costs.  
    At this point one might expect that I would start lamenting the growth and breadth of government largesse, and I do, but that is not the purpose of this post.  Maybe in the future I'll endeavor to list all of the worthless government programs that we would be wise to get rid of but not today.  Today I am focusing on the motivation of some politicians for whom the tax code is their holy grail.  I am not going to bore you with the year-by-year history of how the tax code and the proportionate size of government has grown.  I'll start with the modern age of liberalism circa 1980.  I was born in 1979, and throughout my entire life I have heard liberals and democrats call for higher taxes.  Why? To pay for all of these programs that apparently we just can not live without.  Again, I could launch into a tirade about the fallacy of this reasoning but I will save that for some other time.  What I am going to do is something I never do but for the purpose of this argument and the corresponding point I will make I will go ahead and accept the liberal premise that we need all of these programs to function as a society.  So every election cycle the democrats want to raise money to increase revenue for these crucial government services, and it is something that makes sense to a lot of Americans. 
    Fast forward to 2000, and the election of President George W. Bush (and yes, he was elected; Al Gore never won the state of Florida under any standard, it did not happen).  Because of the way the world was changed because of tragic events of September 11, 2001, many of us have forgotten what the major issues concerning that critical election of 2000 were.  Then Governor Bush ran primarily on the platform of lowering taxes to stimulate economic growth while now-lunatic Algore ran a campaign that included a mythical "lock box" for social security.  Bush won (yes he did), and the Bush tax cuts (which really were not all that large to begin with) took effect.  At the time of his inauguration the economy was heading for a recession (despite claims from the Clinton camp that we were running a budget surplus that was in reality a projection of future revenues based on computers models but not based on anything real).  Then 9/11 happened, and the recession was in full swing.  We then invaded Afghanistan where we are still fighting today and in 2003 of course we (rightfully) invaded Iraq.  Because of the Bush tax cuts we were able to withstand the recession, 9/11, and the fighting of two foreign wars and actually came out on the other end more robust then ever.  The stock market has nearly doubled, unemployment is basically nil, and the economy is roaring here in 2007.  
    What about government programs? Surely we had to lose some of the government programs in order to "pay" for the Bush tax cuts, because less money went to federal government right?  Not even close.  Not only has each government program actually grown  in size, but the government has taken in more money in taxation.  How can this be?  Well without getting into a dissertation on supply-side economics, it is as simple as this: More people had more of their own money which would have been otherwise confiscated by the federal government, and so they spent it.  More things were bought and sold and the result was (as it always is) an increase in revenue to the government, just like what happened in the sixties and the eighties.  There is a little more to it than that, but that also is for another day.  Bottom line, lower taxes produce greater revenues, it has been proven over and over.
    So we come to where we are today, and that is the liberal democrats calling for higher taxes while just about every republican calling for tax cuts of some kind.  Why raise taxes? To boost revenue of course, yet as I have just explained it is actually tax decreases which boost revenue, and this is something that is plain for everyone to see.  So why, when the evidence is so clear, do democrats want to raise taxes?  Assuming that we need all of these special programs or else, and that that is the nature of their concern, wouldn't it make sense to actually lower taxes, since it has been proven that revenue will actually increase?
    The answer of course is a big, fat, HELL NO.  The democrats want to raise taxes despite the evidence that lowering taxes raises revenue.  So the question must be asked; Why?  This is the point that I have been building up to: democrats and liberals want to raise your taxes not because it will increase revenue to the federal government but because THEY WANT TO CONTROL AS MUCH OF YOUR LIFE AS POSSIBLE.  It is as simple as that.  It is one thing to claim to want to raise taxes because it will help people, it is quite another to know that tax cuts actually accomplish that goal and still call for tax hikes.  There is a reason why liberals dominate govt., academia, media, and law; it is because these are institutions where their liberalism goes unchallenged and they can assert power over as many people as enter their world.  Liberal tax policy is the embodiment of their larger elitist worldview: that they are the smartest people in the world and you are too stupid to know this so they must control you for your own good.  Of course your own good is not the same as their own good, as they never subject themselves to the prescriptions of social engineering they endeavor to inflict on the rest of us.   For them, taxation is not for any greater good, it is to keep average people average.
    It is said that the only two guarantees in this life are death and taxes.  To a liberal politician, morality is taxing people to death and then taxing what they try to leave behind to loved ones.  While there is not much any of us can do about death, we ought to try fight this insidious ideology which seeks taxation as a means of control, with the ultimate goal being a utopia that resembles the cess pool that was the former Soviet Union.