I doubt there is anybody in this country who isn’t aware of the tax bill that was recently passed. I’m not writing a post arguing whether it will or won’t actually lead to lower taxes because I’m not actually qualified to digest the current tax code, let alone the new tax code. Instead I’m just going to wait and see if I actually get to keep more of my paycheck.
What I do want to write about is peoples’ reactions, specially those who opposed this bill from the beginning. If most of these people were opposing the bill because it would actually lead to higher taxes, I could understand their reaction. However, most of them aren’t complaining about that. Instead they’re almost hysterical because various government programs are getting cut and that will somehow lead to people spontaneously combusting or some such nonsense.
With almost instantaneous access to information across the world I cannot fathom how anybody still believes that government programs actually do what their proponents claim they do. Everyday we read stories about government programs either not delivering the services they promise to deliver, money being diverted from government services into the pockets of the people put in charge of them, or new private startups coming into existence in order to provide the very service the government service provider promises to deliver. What I’m saying is that the government doesn’t actually do what it claims it does and therefore nobody would care if a department charged with providing a specific service gets its funding cut.
No matter how much funding government service providers receive they always provide, at best, a subpar service and their slack must sooner or later be picked up by nongovernmental individuals and organizations. That being the case, letting individuals and organizations who actually help people keep a bit of their money will do more good than any funding to a government program.