Liberty Maven

On his Tonight Show appearance, Ron Paul made the statement that if we were to abolish the income tax we would only reduce the federal budget to about the size it was in the year 2000.  The Washington Post, not enjoying hearing things like that, decided to do their own analysis so they could point out how wrong he was.  This is what they came up with:

Expounding on his proposal for abolishing the income tax, Paul claims this would still leave the U.S. Treasury with roughly the revenues it had in 2000, in the final year of the Clinton administration. A post on the Paul campaign website explains that individual income taxes account for “approximately one third of federal revenue.” Unfortunately for the tax slashers, the one-time Libertarian candidate for president is wrong on both counts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, individual income taxes represent between 45 and 49 percent of federal tax revenues, depending on the year. For financial year 2007, total receipts from individual income tax were in the region of $1.1 trillion dollars. If you eliminated all that revenue, the federal budget would shrink to the size it was around 1995.

Are you kidding me?  Assuming the Post’s numbers are accurate, he was only off by a few years.  How could we possibly live with the minuscule government we had just twelve years ago?  That was during the Clinton administration’s tenure.  Times were really tough back then, weren’t they?   The Cato Institute’s article on this subject describes this nitpicking with:

The Post’s criticism is akin to condemning a book because the typesetting was not centered on a few pages.

Ron Paul’s opponents are clearly getting more and more desperate to find ways to criticize him.

Read the Cato Institute article here.