What Do California and Kansas Have In Common?

(The following is written and submitted for publication on LeftWingCapitalist by Guy Heston.)

The governor is proposing to triple the tax on cigarettes! To add salt to the wound of those with certain vices he wants to raise the tax on most booze by 50%! That’s just the beginning! He wants to raise income taxes and spend more on teacher pensions and less on highways! This in a state that has a huge deficit! Good grief, can’t elected officials balance a budget?!! Forgive all those exclamation points, it’s just that as a taxpayer I get riled about taxing and spending and highway potholes.

I am not writing about California,

Government Waste or Smart Investment: You Decide

(The following is written and submitted for publication on LeftWingCapitalist by Guy Heston.)

My friends on the right often argue that liberals such as myself are hopelessly misguided taxers and spenders who will brazenly throw around public money like a drunken sailor. For examples of this argument, please see the Howard Jarvis TaxpayersAssociation website (http://hjta.org/) on which so many postings seem to rant and rave apoplectically about needless expenses from the public purse and overall government waste.

I suggest that in our eagerness to get all lathered up about waste we often don’t recognize the difference between an expense and an investment, and here are a couple of examples.

Let’s start with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),