Don't Support the Free Market, Support Government!

Are small businesses bad for the government? A recent dialogue in the U. S. House of Representatives suggested as much. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a hearing with the House Small Business Committee that it was necessary to raise taxes on small businesses to provide increased government revenue for essential programs. Here’s a snatch from the CNS News story:

When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”—including federal education spending.

“We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because we see no alternative to a balanced approach to reduce our fiscal deficits,” said Geithner.

“If you don’t touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you’re trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country,” said Geithner.

Read the whole report.

Many of us certainly do want to fund some government programs. But we should also recognize that there is an ideological divide in the country over whether big government as a principle is good or bad. Historically, political liberals have championed this perspective; in recent decades, political conservatives have bought into a philosophy of larger federal government as well. For some, this is disconcerting. One would hope that small businesses would be encouraged to flourish in this country, which has enjoyed an uncommonly healthy economic climate in part because it has done just that–made it easy for citizens to enter the free market for the betterment of themselves and their communities and society.