re: #222 Obdicut

I know plenty of Israelis that would disagree all over the place with that assessment. Especially in the wake of the fires.

Would you support us raising our taxes to Israel’s levels?

Good government is a wide tent. I think we too have a good government. With the taxes more or less where they are now. For our circumstances, that’s close to right. We need somewhat higher taxes and substantially lower spending, eventually, so as to pay down the national debt. And then, we need to hold federal spending to something like 20% of the national economy. Cities and states take their own fraction, and it all adds up.

The State sector can only get so big before it starts eating the national economy’s seed corn.

I don’t know what the tax situation is in Israel. But people will bear heavy taxes without throwing in the towel if there’s some national emergency and making money and paying taxes is a point of pride. Here, people don’t much aspire to making money solely to be able to pay more taxes.