And I offer an equally oft-repeated alternative.

The Left wants to ever more heavily tax the rich, and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians can’t conceive of any taxing or spending alternative. Conservatives want to lower taxes and cut government spending. A current example of the former is playing out in California.

Federal cuts to the state’s Medicaid program will leave its health system short of billions of dollars. A California healthcare union wants an emergency, one-time 5% levy on the wealth of any resident worth over $1 billion to plug the hole.

Those Federal cuts are a small and rare spending cut victory. Raising taxes on the rich (for those who truly think that 5% tax is a one-off, I might have some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that might interest you) is the only answer Progressive-Democrats and rent-seeking union managers can think of.

The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer is cut from the same cloth. She opened her piece with this:

The risk is that the US economy becomes increasingly dependent on a narrow group of very rich households, whose spending is tied to the performance of the stock market. This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction.

It’s inconceivable to the denizens of the Left that alternatives exist. There are two—closely intertwined—that come readily to mind. In no particular order, they are cutting tax rates and cutting government spending.

Don’t just willy-nilly do allegedly targeted tax cuts, instead, lower the tax rates on the bottom 80% of us tax payers to the level paid by the top 20%. An easy, but all too difficult politically, way to do this is simply to reform our tax code to charge a single low flat rate on all income regardless of source—a rate in the range of 10%-15% on the sum of an individual’s income from all sources. Of course, that would include the market value of stock options on the date of an award’s vesting and other such moves to transfer income from W-2 forms into other venues. That guarantees all of us are paying the same rates and it eliminates the news writer’s plaint: that claimed dependency of the government on tax revenue from the rich.

The other component of the intertwining is to reduce government spending. Exercise true fiscal discipline, and spend taxpayers’ money only on those things truly, critically needed; stop spending on the nice-to-have goodies.

A wealth gap will still exist, but that’s neither good nor bad in itself. The gap—especially under the more equitable tax regime—is, and would be, the result of differences in luck, work ethic, and innate talent. The increased economic mobility that would obtain also would have folks on the lower rungs moving up the economic ladder as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it, and folks on the upper rungs moving down as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it.