Conservative confusion about "no free lunch"

Many conservatives ARE confused about the impact of deficits, tax cuts and federal spending. But their misunderstandings are dwarfed by the misconceptions of liberals.

In fact, federal debt isn’t really foisted upon our children but is, instead, an immediate drag on the economy realized primarily through inflation. And it is not deficit spending, per se, but ALL governmental spending that is economically harmful as it must be paid for at the expense of more productive endeavors either directly (taxes) or indirectly (inflation).

The concept that "there ain't no free lunch" isn’t “conservative”. It’s an economic law no less real than the law of gravity. One can’t merely print money to create wealth; money is devalued by any amount added to the money supply. Only productive activities create wealth. The Law of Unintended Consequences, indicating that the costs associated with any given economic action are often far-reaching and ill-recognized is no less immutable, as are the facts that taxes stifle economy activity, that you get less of whatever you tax, and that corporate taxes are inevitably passed on to the consumer. None of these are "conservative" positions. They are all examples of basic economics.

The problem with your attacks upon these premises is that they are completely false. The reputable studies indicating that tax cuts only help grow the economy on the margin don’t exist. The wide body of scholarship indicating the effectiveness of both the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts (from much higher levels than the Bush cuts) is unassailable. Further, studies (and basic economic logic) indicate that certain taxes ultimately DO pay for themselves given time, though the marginal cuts passed by Bush certainly may not.

Invariably, government “services” (with the possible exception of national defense) cost more than the ultimate benefit. And transfer payments are an economic disaster.