Taxes, Poverty and Charity

Last night I watched "American Idol Gives Back" raise over $30 million (according to reporter Anna David) for charity, half going to charity recipients in the United States. Certainly an impressive effort on the part of the producers of the show and generous on the part of the donors.

This morning I read two short reports in the paper, both related in some way to taxes. One stated that the Florida House had voted to "overhaul KidCare, the health insurance program for low-income children, so that the children of state employees and immigrants are covered." The other article reported that the Federal government had on Tuesday April 24 of this year broken the record for collection of personal income taxes set on April 25 of 2006. Last year's record was $36.4 billion. This Tuesday's take was (wait for it) $48.7 billion. This is a 33.7% increase, in one year.

Just three obervations I would like to make.

One, that one could extrapolate from this enormous jump in one-day revenue that the economy is doing well and tax revenues have surged because of the tax cuts implemented in the last seven years. The cuts should be increased and made permanent.

Two, taxes should be cut even more until government revenue declines, because the more money the government collects, the more ways it finds to spend it. The KidCare report is symptomatic of this inclination. All of a sudden, a program designed to help low-income children is now going to subsidize government employees.

And three, taxes should really be cut even more because they are a highly inefficient way to help the poor. Tax revenues support huge and growing bureaucracies that consume much of the inflow before remitting some to the needy. Private charity efforts are alive and well in this country (as demonstrated by "AI Gives Back"), and much more efficient than government. Lower taxes would enable people to donate more to charity, and at a philosophical level, donations are voluntary whereas tax collections, redistributed to beneficiaries selected by the government, are coercive charity or perhaps just robbery.

VT murderer - Madman or Evil Psychopath?

It has been a week since the murders at Virginia Tech. As has everyone else, I have heard many comments and questions from family and from people who know our three daughters graduated from Tech. Of course, having any kind of link to the university is in the end irrelevant. This could have happened on just about any campus, and it affects everyone to some degree.

Several people characterize the murderer (he who shall emphatically not be named) as evil. Others speak of his autistic symptoms. It seems that by applying a label to the killer, we are trying to internalize the horror and manage it. So to that extent, a label is only as useful as its effectiveness in dealing with the shock. But these interpretations of the gunman's psyche also direct how we think about preventing such behavior.

If he was a psychopath and evil, he should have been sent to prison. He forfeited his right to freedom when he chose to become a threat to others. He was conscious of his murderous intent.

If he was mentally ill (one can of course argue that psychopathy is by definition also a mental illness) in a physiological sense, he was not evil so much as delusional. He belonged in obligatory treatment, perhaps for life, in a mental hospital.

In either case, his history of violent writings, stalking of women and referral to psych counseling should have been in the public record, accessible to law enforcement officers and gun sellers. One's right to privacy extends only until it puts other people at risk. Systematic coordination of information from police records, counseling services and school reports could produce a profile of danger in time to prevent tragedy. And prevention is always more effective than reaction.