I disagree with your assertion that the conflation of rate cuts and tax cuts is a recent trend. Only very rarely in 25 years have I heard any pol or reporter provide a statement clearly differentiating between rate cuts and tax cuts.

The left mystificate the tax system to the greatest extent they can, as they do with so many of their policies that cannot withstand the clarity of honest discussion.

It is also possible that “unwilling largesse” is ironic. Like Shakespeare, The Colbert Report, “Frank Burns is a good doctor and a fine human being,” and whatnot.

Furthermore, it is not largesse on the part of those forcing the “donation”. There exists no generosity on their behalf, because it’s not their money. If you start calling this theft largesse, then so can they! They can start touting how “generous” they are. Do you really want to start abetting their thievery? If you are forced to “donate”, then it is not largesse on your part, either, as there exists no generosity. So, no such thing as unwilling largesse.

I stand by my critique.

How in the world did the country manage until the 1913 (”pre thievery”) passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, giving the Congress “power” to levy taxes on income ?

Now we are muddled in boatloads of ignorance, and generations in the gubbmint schools have been conditioned to think it’s all the gubbmint’s money. Joe Biden recently said it’s “patriotic” to pay taxes. (Geithner & Daschle apparently didn’t get the memo)

U.S. Constitution: Sixteenth Amendment

If the kleptocrats (of all parties) genuinely mean “tax cut” to be an abbreviated form of “tax rate cut” they wouldn’t immediately follow their blather about tax cuts that aren’t ’cause they’re really tax rate cuts with prattle about how working Americans will be keeping more of their own money blah blah blah.

No, Marc Malone, America’s only native criminal class is deliberately indulging in bamboozling us by steeping their rhetoric with the fallacy of equivocation (among many others) and hoping that marks like you don’t notice you’re being lied to, or the crooks under the big white teat that tops the capitol building have been so effortlessly equivocating for so long that they’ve formed the habit of misusing language and truly don’t know what they’re talking about any more.

So, they’re liars or idiots. Choose one or both, Marc, and you must choose.

Mr. Simberg’s article would have been much shorter if he’d pointed out that the “tax cut” conflation is rooted in the Fallacy of Confounding the Derivative with the Function.

Leftists, who Mr. Simberg rightly refuses to call “liberals,” are often the sort who fret that those of us who took the calculus didn’t leave any for them.

The amount of tax that a government imposes is the amount it spends. The timing and amount of tax collections is merely finance.

If the government cuts rates or gives rebates, but also increases the size of government, then real taxes are higher. Government is taking a bigger share of the economic pie leaving less for private use or investment.

Milton Friedman pointed out that the burden on the private sector is bigger when the government grows as a percentage of the economy. Focus on government spending, not on how government is financed, whether it’s out of current taxes or future taxes.