Told in October 2021 that the infrastructure and reconciliation packages would die if a single cent had to come out of the 2017 tax cuts, and that the fallback under discussion was an increased gas tax that would soak the average person, John Kiriakou did not dispute the prediction. He answered it with a principle.
Ability to pay
Theodore Roosevelt said, he began, that a person’s tax should be based on his ability to pay. We used to talk about progressive taxation in this country; we used to be proud, for many years, of the progressive taxation system we had. It fell apart under Ronald Reagan, and it has got worse and worse and worse. [1]
We need a tax on the very rich, he says. We know that it won’t hurt them; they won’t even notice it. But these regressive taxes, like increasing the gas tax, hurt the people who are the least able to withstand the hit. [1] [2]
Going back to the 1950s
Kiriakou then turned a familiar conservative slogan around. The Republicans always say we need to go back to the 1950s, to the good old days when everything was great and everybody was getting along. All right, he says — you know what, on taxation, let’s go back to the 1950s, when there was a top rate of ninety per cent or whatever it was, because then we had balanced budgets, and people could work and save and buy a house and do better than their parents did, and provide for their children, and have their children go to college. [2] [3]
With these regressive taxes, he concludes, we have put ourselves in a position where we have just screwed ourselves and the next generation. [3]
The spending side
His complaint about revenue is inseparable from his complaint about outlays. In the same conversation he invoked William Proxmire — a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin who took Joe McCarthy’s seat and gave out an award for the worst waste in government, usually to the Defense Department, which was always trying to inflate its budget or hide the covert budget inside its own. What makes Proxmire worth remembering now, Kiriakou says, is that if he had an objection to government spending, it was to all government spending. [4] [5] He applied that standard to Joe Manchin’s objection to a $1.5 trillion package: we are happy to spend a trillion dollars on defence, and more than the next eight largest countries combined — where was he when the defence budget passed? [6]