We’ll all pay for this massive spending plan

When I was but a youngster, my father and my grandmother frequently told me that money didn't grow on trees. However, I'm starting to think the Democrats and the federal government believe otherwise.

I would remind you there are four ways the government can get money, and none of them are from a tree.

1) Tax citizens' personal income.

2) Tax business income.

3) Levy a tax or fee on something Americans use, i.e. fuel, electricity, airline tickets, groceries. For instance, now the federal government is flirting with taxing us on the number of miles we drive.

In Oklahoma about four years ago, the Democrat state legislature was pondering taxes on dry cleaning and movie tickets. If you think about it, there's not much we don't pay taxes or fees on today.

4) The last way the government can get money is to borrow it. However, if the government borrows it, the only way to pay it back is to ... tax your personal income, your business income, or to levy taxes or fees on something you use.

Bernie Madoff has an investment for you if you think taxes or fees will not be increased based on the amount of spending the federal government is proposing.

Sure, China, Germany, Japan and others may buy our government bonds, which will put us only further in debt to them and further at risk. Those countries are buying our debt during a global meltdown. They will eventually need the money they used to buy our debt for themselves, and when that day comes, God help us.

We are playing Russian Roulette with our economic system. If these countries withhold their money from us, this current market meltdown will seem like a Sunday school picnic. Borrowing from foreign countries is increasingly irresponsible.

If you think we can borrow our way into prosperity, and not have taxes and fees go up, how wrong and misguided you are.

The Obama administration's first budget outline spends more money than the previous administration spent on two wars, 9/11, Katrina and the tech bubble bursting, combined.

Admittedly, the Bush administration and Republicans took spending to new levels when they were in power, and some of it was irresponsible. But what we are seeing now is a new definition of a spending spree.

If you think you'll be exempt from paying more in taxes and fees, you should think again.

It is bad to raise taxes and fees in a bad economy -- or in a good economy, for that matter.

I've said it before: We don't need more taxes, we need more taxpayers. We need to allow people to keep as much of their money as possible, for them to spend in any kind of economy.

Why?

Because when people are buying goods -- a tractor, for instance -- it helps the employee who manufactured the tractor, the employee who transported the tractor, the employee who financed the tractor, the employee who sold the tractor, and the employee who will service the tractor.

This excessive spending, borrowing and raising of taxes and fees will negatively effect the little fellow -- you mark my word.

Finally, in any economy, government policy should encourage people to be a resource as opposed to being a drain on resources. In today's so-called stimulus package, we are going back to the old model of welfare, which encourages government dependency and stifles productivity.

Giving bonuses to states for increasing their welfare rolls -- not reducing them -- is bad public policy. We should never define compassion by how many people are on welfare rolls. Rather we should define compassion by how few people are on public welfare, because then we have given people the resources to climb the ladder of economic opportunity.

A friend of mine, the late Adrian Rogers, once said, "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

"When half the people get the idea they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that my dear friends, is about the end of any nation."

I could not have said it better myself.

J.C. Watts (JCWatts01@jcwatts.com), chairman of J.C. Watts Companies, a business consulting group, is former chairman of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House, where he served as an Oklahoma representative from 1995 to 2002. He writes twice monthly for the Review-Journal.