Going to post the whole thing, but this happened at Lileks.

A minor political note, if you’re interested in such things. The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support for her presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for this man. She was very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the talking points she was utterly unprepared to argue anything, because she didn’t know what she was talking about. She had bullet points, and she believed that any reasonable person would see the importance of these issues and naturally fall in line. But she could not support any of her assertions. Her final selling point: Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.
Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide - from the guys who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light fixtures. It’s called economic activity. What’s more, home improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn’t shoot up, I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen ” I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?
“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.
“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”
“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”
“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”
That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:
“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
Then she left.
And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It’s the philanthropist in me.

Once again, I do not understand the mentality. Someone really needs to explain to me why higher taxes are a good thing. While no taxes are a little unrealistic, relatively low taxes are a good way for me to spend more money. While my salary has gone down relatively in the past few years, I actually spend more money now fixing the house. I’m paying contractors to fix things that I have let go for years. Most people I know are spending more, which boosts the economy.
Vague mumblings about the national debt being bad don’t get it for me. If you have ever bought a savings bond, you have contributed to the national debt. If I have this right, it took several years to drop the debt back down to nothing that Reagan ran up. But I didn’t hear about huge drops in government services. They didn’t kick all the starving waifs out of the poorhouses or anything. So this tells me that in a bad economy, its OK for the national debt to rise, lower taxes and interest rates accordingly, and as more people have more of their own money to spend, they’ll use it. Using money makes money. More money flowing does mean more net government income from taxes. It does work that way. I know most of economics is voodoo, but it does make some sense.

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