What we need is a tax cut!

This is an old cartoon that I drew back in 2005 but I redrew it after recently witnessing a group of protesters at a traffic intersection. They were waving placards criticising the government for the poor state of the roads (a criticism with some validity) but there were also signs calling for tax cuts, which struck me as a paradox. It seems to me that governments facing the competing demands of running a country have three levers that they can pull; they can increase government debt, increase taxes or cut costs in the form of decreased services and infrastructure development. Of course this is an overly simplistic view, managing a country is extremely complex, but it has a grain of truth to it. Over the past 40 years there has been a steady stream of personal tax cuts mainly targeted at higher income earners which has meant less money in government coffers for services and infrastructure development. The problems governments face today are extreme but yet more tax cuts will not solve them.