“It’s just not the right thing to do to shut down a bunch of rural hospitals to pay for tax cuts,” Sen. Josh Hawley recently said regarding financial legislation that is currently under consideration in Congress.
This statement irks me. I’ve seen statements like this numerous times over the years, and I am irked every time I see one. Because there’s no such thing as “paying for tax cuts.” Tax cuts are not something that you pay for, because tax cuts are not something that costs money. Tax cuts do not involve spending money on something. They involve collecting less tax money to begin with. In other words, tax cuts do not constitute an expense for the government; they constitute a reduction in revenue.
It’s true that both expenses and reductions in revenue have the same result: the government ends up with less money, and therefore has to cut spending in order to balance its budget. But this does not mean that an expense and a reduction in revenue are the same thing. They aren’t.
Tax cuts are not something that you pay for. They are something that requires you to cut spending, because you’re now taking in less revenue.
This distinction is important because in my opinion, tax cuts are a good thing, while spending is not. Every government should strive to collect as little revenue as possible and to have as few expenses as possible. Statements like Hawley’s, about “paying for” tax cuts, are made almost exclusively by people who oppose the tax cuts in question. To portray tax cuts as something that has to be “paid for” is to equate tax cuts with expenses, thereby making tax cuts sound irresponsible, like some new and unnecessary spending program. But tax cuts are not irresponsible; they are exactly what every government should be aiming to implement. They don’t involve spending money at all; they involve taking in less revenue.
It would have been more accurate for Hawley to say, “If the tax cuts are implemented, the government won’t be able to pay for rural hospitals anymore.” Because unlike tax cuts, rural hospitals are actually something that the government is paying for.
Whether or not implementing those tax cuts is the right thing to do is a matter of debate – I would say yes – but regardless of where you stand on that issue, you should use the correct language to describe what you’re talking about. Yes, the government will need to cut spending in order to accommodate the tax cuts. And that is something that a lot of people are opposed to. But tax cuts are not expenses, and they’re not something that anyone needs to “pay for.”