I can’t understand why Americans talk conservative but vote liberal when it comes to government spending, until I read some of the nonsense that passes as thoughtful journalism in our nation’s newspapers.

Michael Gartner of USA Today is critical of a capital gains tax cut because, you guessed it, the rich benefit more than the poor and middle class. Of course they do. They make more money! Gartner, along with most politicians, views tax policy as punitive. It designed to punish. If the less prosperous can’t have what a wealthy person has, then the wealthy person shouldn’t have it either. When people claim the rich should be taxed move, where does that money go? It doesn’t go in the pocket of those calling for higher taxes on the rich.

What happens when these rich people get to keep more of their money? They spend it. Their spending creates jobs. People on welfare don’t create jobs unless they are government jobs. Our welfare system necessitates a bureaucracy to handle the programs. Of course, these bureaucracies become entrenched voting blocks to maintain the programs.

The rich also invest and save their profits making more money available to lending institutions, thus, creating more jobs. With more money floating around in the private economy, interest rates drop. Cheaper money creates more jobs. Everybody benefits except career politicians who use tax policies to buy votes.

Americans generally go along with the punitive nature of the tax code out of envy. They don’t have what the rich have, and they don’t want the rich to have it either. Therefore they do not mind punishing rich people for being rich.

At the same time, socialist America jumps for joy when tax breaks are handed out piecemeal to their pet programs. We’ll give a $500 per child tax break here, Joe Republican promises. A tuition tax credit over there, Bob Democrat guarantees. We’ll forgive student loan debt. And the people cheer. Governments shouldn’t be loaning money. The government doesn’t have any money to loan. It has to take it form someone to give it to someone else. I suspect that there are a lot of conservatives who are behind the government loan programs. Keep in mind that we are partly in this mess today because of federally guaranteed mortgage loan programs mandate by Congress. What we should be after is a reduction in everybody’s taxes, and an increase in the taxes of those who aren’t paying any federal taxes. Some sort of consumption tax is the best way to go. Of course, there needs to be a significant reduction in government spending, and I mean significant.

Politicians may be corrupt, but they aren’t stupid. (Well, some of them are.) There are more people with children than rich fat-cats who own businesses. Politicians play the envy card, pitting the many (the middle class and poor) against the few (the rich), to buy the necessary votes to stay in power.

Minimum-wage legislation, passed by Republicans and Democrats, works the same way. There are more workers than business owners. Forcing business owners to pay a certain wage is a tax, pure and simple. Since there are more workers than business owners, politicians can get away with the fraud.

What about guaranteed un-paid family leave? Sounds like a great idea, unless you’re a business owner. Since most congressmen have never owned a business, they don’t have any conception of what it takes to keep one going. Employers should work with their employees, to be flexible and understanding when illness hits. But to mandate it? Never. A good business will try to keep its best employees. If they are hardnosed, then I suggest that you go somewhere else to work.

The latest liberal feel-good legislation is putting graphic pictures on tobacco products. They were to show the effects of habitual tobacco use. In June of this year, “Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg announce[d] new graphic warning labels for tobacco products designed to encourage people to quit and young people to not acquire this dangerous habit.” The tobacco companies protested. Such legislation is a violation of free speech since using tobacco products is legal.

I am no fan of cigarette smoking. Everybody knows that smoking makes you sick. There’s even a label on the side of every pack that tells smokers that they can get cancer from the infernal weed. People knew this even before the labels went. The first time some kind started smking a cigarette, it made him sick. The body was saying, “Don’t do this.”

Do people still smoke? Yes. Outlawing tobacco products will not work. Prohibition didn’t work, and the so-called war on drugs is about as successful as America’s war effort in Vietnam. There’s a simple way to solve the cigarette problem. Let insurance companies deny coverage to cigarette smokers. Why involve the government? If people want to die early, let them pay for it out of their own pockets.

The hypocrisy of government officials is astounding. Smoking is legal. Our government collects taxes on every tobacco product sold. If the effects are that horrible, why not outlaw them? And let’s be consistent. Automobile accidents result in the death of 50,000 people each year in the United States. Why not require every car dealer to show gruesome images of some of the accidents? Since our government funds abortion, why not require each person seeking an abortion look at a sonogram to show what she’s aborting?

A lot of generally conservative people fall for the logic of the Left. I suspect that most of them support the minimum wage even though it is coercive and causes unemployment and higher prices. Our elected officials should get out of the warning business and spend more time doing what they took an oath to do: Protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. And that does not mean sending young men and women overseas to fight wars.