I was in Nashville at ChannelCon recently and somebody came up to me and asked if I’d debate Larry Walsh on a podcast live at the conference – I said absolutely all I have to do is get the liberal talking points to know what he is going to say. He declined – which I understand – the facts are so destructive to his blogs.
His latest blog post which aligns with the daily liberal talking points, “Sorry Charlie, Taxes Aren’t Theft,” is another TDS-fueled, biased diatribe that regurgitates talking points from mainstream media, cherry-picks facts, and ignores history, economics, and journalistic balance. He inaccuratey lauds the efficacy of taxation as a “collective agreement” and the “pride of democracy in action” while throwing stones and dismissing Charlie Kirk as a “provocateur” for calling it theft, yet his post is littered with inaccuracies and selective framing to prop up big-government liberalism.
Jumping to Conclusion and Biased Framing
His blog is standard emotional liberal cheerleading that jumps to conclusions without providing any evidence or context. He makes bold claims that taxes are a “settled” issue and “product of democracy” and what do we do with people like Charlie Kirk who defy the government and call it theft. It was your government that started the practice, but the U.S. did not found our nation with income taxes – we were built on tariffs and excise duties, something you even briefly admit to with passing references to the Federalist papers on customs houses and the Whiskey Rebellion.
The writers of the Constitution purposefully did not include direct taxation – in fact, Article I, Section 9 specifically prohibited federal income taxes until the 16th Amendment was passed in 1913 at the urging of progressives who wanted to expand government and opposes the masses. You conveniently leave that out and pretend the system we have today is some sort of “collective agreement” since time immemorial when it is actually a product of the 20th Century that got out of control under FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society another prime example of government failure and oppression through dependence. More slavery of different type.
These two administrations and their big-government policies of Democrat presidents doubled the size of government, nationalized Keynesian economics that has not been matched by growth in prosperity, and used debt and monetary policy to fuel an explosion of spending and taxes in social programs while enriching special interests at the expense of entrepreneurs who created wealth in the U.S. economy. The tax code was designed to encourage cronyism and then rapidly grew more complex to regulate it while subsidizing the same special interests. The entire tax system is one massive wealth transfer to politically connected insiders, and you paper over it with pablum about democracy.
You also completely gloss over the Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 or the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 as if they are no big deal, but they were both revolts over taxes and governance which saw farmers in Massachusetts and whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania protest taxes as theft, essentially a government taking their property, because they lacked the power to influence government. They were “tea party” type movements before it was cool for D.C. elites, and today we see massive growth in dependence on government spending from $1 trillion in 1970 to $6 trillion last year when the Democrats and Republicans both run deficits and spend trillions of new debt. The money isn’t growing on trees, and as Charlie states, it is coming out of hard-working taxpayers’ paychecks.
Today when members of Congress push $7.5 billion in new government EV chargers but have built less than 7 charging stations since 2023 , or when the Democrats spend $2 trillion in COVID relief money and half of it is fraudulent (SBA Inspector General, 2024), it is easy to see why Americans are feeling tapped out and skeptical of taxation as theft. Taxation just soaks money out of the private economy to fuel more government growth and entitlements that never seem to satisfy the appetite of leftist politicians and their billionaire benefactors, and when the money runs out, they just print more, driving up inflation that actually falls most heavily on the poor. Tying your economic future to the whims of Washington bureaucrats and the Fed is economic tyranny and robs people of opportunity.
When you point to European nations as some high-tax exemplar, you ignore the reality that they are stagnating at far higher taxes and welfare rates than America. Denmark’s effective tax rate is the highest in the world at 55%, and its GDP growth is the slowest of any OECD country at 1.2%. Meanwhile, the U.S. has some of the lowest taxes in the developed world and the most prosperous economy on the planet. And calling trickle-down economics “discredited” is just lazy talking point regurgitation without a historical context. Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981 and then again in 1986, and as a result, the U.S. grew at an average annual rate of 3.5% and the Treasury took in twice as much revenue during his two terms as when taxes were higher . Facts like these you leave out when you want to make the left look smart.
As for Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” as a true conservative, I love low taxes, but just because Trump campaigned on tax cuts does not make his proposal a “redistribution to the ultra-rich” that would “add $4 trillion to the debt,” as you say. The latest CBO estimate for Trump’s plan is $1.9 trillion over 10 years as found in CBO, 2025 update, which lowers tax rates in all brackets and increases after-tax wages by 2.9% for low-income households, per the BLS. You ignore the fact that Democrats have vastly outspent Republicans on the debt under Biden, who piled on $6 trillion in new debt in three years, much of it green boondoggles from the “Inflation Reduction Act” that CBO says will not materially reduce inflation or CO2 emissions.
The Liberal Myth of Charity as Socialism
Larry, what is your beef with wealth? I get it – rich people make you jealous, which is why your blog is such an infantile, self-righteous huffing and puffing about taxes and pointing fingers at Charlie Kirk and people who dare to challenge government control of private property and earnings. But I also get that you liberals think that other people’s money is yours for the taking. You extol the virtues of taxes and say we need them to fund “social programs” for the “general welfare” of all, but the only welfare that really matters is the welfare of the individual, and taxation is a legalized tool to grab earnings from productive people to buy votes with other people’s money. You might not feel like stealing when you have government take $2 trillion to “spread it around,” as Speaker Pelosi put it, but from the person who earns that money in a free market through ingenuity, hard work, and risk, it most certainly is theft.
I find it ironic that you liberals love to virtue-signal and preen with other people’s money. What an ego boost it must be to feel so morally and financially superior without having to actually work and take a risk, get rejected, and try again, like most people have to do who want to do good in the world. Instead, just demand that government take other people’s money and force them to pay you for your good works. You end your blog post talking about “wealthy loopholes,” but instead of acting like a pouty hypocrite about rich people’s freedom to choose what to do with their money, why don’t you start your own charity? It would be a breeze with your high profile, surely you could raise a pile of money for the good works you say you want to do, but that would mean actual effort, Larry. Y ou want an easy way to point fingers at “privileged people” and regulate everyone else into serfdom? Sounds like a cushy job with no accountability or risk.
Taxation is immorally historic
Historically speaking, you’re dead wrong when you present taxes as the foundation of our nation’s growth and prosperity. Tariffs on goods and minimal government were the reason this country grew and developed, and charity and social safety nets were privately funded by community and church-based organizations that grew out of individual liberty and voluntary giving and mutual aid, not the liberal lust for confiscating other people’s hard work to assuage their sense of spiritual and moral inferiority.
Alexis de Tocqueville even marveled in the 1830s (Democracy in America) at the pervasiveness of voluntary associations in America, where churches, community members, and private charities provided help for neighbors without the heavy hand of D.C. You can cite any number of historical examples to show that, long before the left became your religion, America was a Christian nation that valued people over programs, but you ignore those facts because they don’t fit your narrative that taxation is a necessary tool of big-government control. Your blog is historically and morally corrupt because your use of taxation is to buy the power of the Democratic Party through entitlement programs that make the poor poorer by taking away their power to control their own lives and destinies.
Welfare is an anchor on any economy – not an engine – and it traps generations in a cycle of poverty – 70% of long-term welfare recipients remain dependent on social programs. Welfare also hurts economic mobility and opportunity because it distorts incentives and actually decreases entrepreneurship. High taxation on success and innovation is economic tyranny, and it robs the poor of their dignity and keeps them in perpetual servitude by choice, which is exactly how TDS Democrats want it. Liberals will never have true compassion until they start empowering people to succeed rather than control them with handouts.
Larry, the sad truth is your TDS-fueled blog posts turn a legitimate debate on the size and scope of government overreach and control into sanctimonious liberal cheerleading about taxation as theft. It’s your leftist bias that keeps you from understanding the issues.
But if you’d like some real insights with facts, my website is at https: //knelsonvsi.com – and I will keep checking you and your facts with a grin on my face.
