In a statement posted on Twitter/X, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) said:
REMINDER: The single biggest driver of our national debt for the last 25 YEARS have been Republican-led tax cuts.
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 21, 2026
Senator Murray’s claim that tax reductions are the cause of the national debt relies on a fundamental distortion of political economy—one that treats uncollected private earnings as a government loss rather than property left with its rightful owners. Blaming a deficit on tax cuts is functionally identical to a compulsive overspender blaming his credit card debt on his boss for refusing to hand over a larger salary. In Murray’s inverted worldview, the government possesses a natural claim to 100% of the citizenry’s income, rendering any earnings left in private hands an implicit “gift” or a “cost” to the state.
As Henry Hazlitt established in Economics in One Lesson, a government cannot give anything to anyone that it does not first take from someone else. A deficit does not occur because the public was permitted to retain its earned wealth; it occurs because a profligate Congress continuously outspends its baseline revenues to fund an ever-expanding administrative apparatus. To accuse productive taxpayers of driving the national debt simply by keeping their own money—rather than addressing the unchecked growth of entitlement and mandatory spending—is a masterclass in parliamentary gaslighting, a blatant attempt to shift blame from the politicians holding the spending pen to the citizens footing the bill.
This arrogant and idiotic thought process is common within government and it was broadly applauded on line. It goes largely unchallenged because we citizens sit by and allow self-serving politicians to lecture us with nonsensical claims that defy economic truths. People want much from the government but what they do not understand is that the only thing the government can give them is what already belongs to them.
Hazlitt further posited a core premise that serves not merely as an empirical observation, but as an inescapable economic axiom:
”Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for…The government can give nothing to anyone that it does not first take from someone else.”
Treating this truth as a foundational law of political economy shifts the analytical lens from political intention to resource accounting. Because the state is structurally a consumer rather than a creator of real wealth, public expenditure possesses no independent generative power; every dollar disbursed via government intervention represents a corresponding dollar extracted—whether through direct taxation, debt issuance, or currency debasement—from the productive private sector. To treat Hazlitt’s insight as axiomatic is to recognize that government programs cannot create net societal resources out of thin air, but can only ever reallocate existing ones, making the cost of any public project strictly equal to the private wealth foregone to finance it.
What makes the public’s celebration of government “bonuses,” tax rebates, and corporate subsidies so thoroughly exasperating is the profound political amnesia required to view them as benevolence rather than partial restitution. The modern state produces no market value; it possesses no original capital, no independent revenue stream, and no divine mint but operates purely as an agent of legal plunder. When the political class magnanimously bestows a child tax credit, a stimulus check, or an industry bailout, it is not distributing “government money,” but merely returning a fraction of the very wealth it forcibly expropriated from the productive citizenry in the first place, after deducting a massive administrative toll to feed its own bureaucracy. As Frédéric Bastiat famously observed, the state relies on a “rough hand” to extract taxes in secret and a “gentle hand” to dole out subsidies in public, tricking the populace into mistaking the partial return of their own stolen property for an act of political charity. To cheer for a government subsidy is akin to thanking a thief for leaving you bus fare from the wallet he just lifted out of your back pocket, a tragic inversion of reality where the victim expresses gratitude to the plunderer for returning a fraction of the loot.
Consider the tragedy of this inversion. The government has not performed a charitable act; it has simply returned a fraction of the loot it stole while keeping the rest for its own service.
The average citizen sees the “gentle hand” at work when a subsidy check arrives or a local project receives federal funding. What remains unseen is the invisible toll exacted by the heavy hand—the wages never earned, the private investments never made, and the higher costs of living driven by currency debasement. By focusing exclusively on what is given while ignoring what was taken, the public falls into a cognitive trap, mistaking the partial return of stolen assets for a gift from a generous sovereign.
This dynamic is not merely an accounting error; it degrades the relationship between the citizen and the state. As Bastiat warned in The Law, when the legal system is perverted into an instrument of “legal plunder,” the boundaries between production and extraction blur. When wealth is accumulated through voluntary exchange in a free market, both parties benefit, and independence is preserved. But when wealth is cycled through the state apparatus, it undergoes a transformation. The taxpayer’s earned income is expropriated, processed through a sprawling bureaucratic filter that consumes a massive administrative toll, and then redistributed as a conditional favor.
What was once private property, held by right, returns to the citizen as a government privilege, subject to compliance with whatever political mandates are attached to the check. While this is not that difficult to understand as an injustice, millions of voters routinely line up to support politicians who make outrageous promises without explaining any means of paying for them. Lately we have heard Vice President J.D. Vance call for a $9,000 subsidy for married stay-at-home mothers, and President Donald Trump awkwardly promise $5,000 rebate in exchange for our midterm votes. Those irresponsible promises are only to be outdone by the socialist wing of the Democratic Party who promise Medicare for All, federal job guarantees, and a host of other programs. Adam Michel of the Cato Institute believes those programs would cost $71-212 trillion dollars over a ten year period.
As usual there is no plan to pay for any of these promises. Revenues from tariffs, even if they remain legal, will not come close to cover the costs suggested by Republicans. As for the socialists, if we seize all the assets of the Forbes 400 and tax corporate profits at 100% we would likely still leave a deficit of tens to hundreds of trillions. Spending at this scale sought by the socialists would require massive, broad-based tax hikes (such as massively high payroll, income, and value-added taxes) on middle-income workers and consumers—ultimately leaving the population much poorer.
If it was not so infuriating it might be funny: millions of voters eagerly lining up at the ballot box, begging the very entity that stripped them of their earnings for a small allowance to make ends meet. Then despite all the literature and instruction to the contrary they appear grateful for getting back what was first bled from them through direct taxation, regulatory drag, or the silent thief of fiat inflation. In a display of civic farce that would make the signers of the Declaration of Independence wince, the crowd cheers for the legislative thieves simply because they tossed a handful of loose change back into the gutter. We have perfected the art of celebrating our own economic subjugation, kneeling before the tax collector to beg for a rebate on the very property he just seized.
When economist Murray Rothbard stated “The State produces nothing; it can only expropriate that which has been produced by others,” he was not offering an opinion he was stating an absolute undeniable truth.
