Tax and spend

"Tax and spend" is a pejorative epithet applied to politicians or policies that increase the size of government.

History

It appears the formulation first appeared in print in a 1938 report in The New York Times, written by Arthur Krock, quoting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's trusted advisor Harry Hopkins, the Administrator of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a key agency of Roosevelt's New Deal program: "[Hopkins] met a criticism of this sinister combination by saying: 'We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.'"[1] According to Krock, the "sinister combination" was Roosevelt, Hopkins, United States Postmaster General James Farley, and New Jersey Democratic political boss Frank Hague.[1]

Two weeks later, Hopkins and Krock argued the point in duelling letters to the editor of The New York Times. First Hopkins flatly denied he had ever laid out the "tax, spend, elect" formulation, but Krock asserted that "I used and printed the quotation after careful verification because, while it fitted completely into Mr. Hopkins's political philosophy as I have understood it, I wanted to be certain of the language." Krock also revealed that he had spoken with witnesses who claimed to have heard Hopkins make the comment at the Empire Race Track in Yonkers, New York, including a "reputable citizen" who was "in lighter hours, a playmate of Mr. Hopkins".[2]

The term is used similarly in the United Kingdom[3][4] and Australia.[5]

gollark: Yes.
gollark: There is proof of stake, which replaces the mining with "staking", where you just put up some coins for a bit and randomly get assigned more based on that. But this is also bad.
gollark: If you benefit from more computation *at all*, someone will just deploy 29383728929 computers doing the more efficient thing.
gollark: It is deliberately wasteful. It can't be useful work or something something side markets (I forgot).
gollark: Yes, but then you couldn't use mining to allocate new coins and make evilness with new blocks expensive.

References
  1. Krock, Arthur. "WIN BACK 10 STATES; Republicans Take Ohio, Wisconsin, Kansas and Massachusetts". Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  2. "Letters to The Times". The New York Times. November 24, 1938, p. 26. Retrieved on May 19, 2009.
  3. Elliott, Larry; White, Michael (1997-01-21). "Brown buries the tax and spend image". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  4. "Labour to end tax-and-spend - McDonnell". BBC News. 2016-03-12. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
  5. "'Tax and spend' is back". www.uq.edu.au. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.