'The third blog'

On Thursday, February 23, 2012, The New York Times published an article titled "America is Europe." 


By going through “America Is Europe”, David Brooks argues about the matter of the essential social problem of the U.S by comparing to the Europe’s one. Overall, it seems that the writer criticizes that the government overplays than what they are supposed, especially welfare field. What is more, the government cannot handle of their tax expenditure properly.  He illustrates that “These tax expenditures are hidden but huge. Budget experts Donald Marron and Eric Toder added up all the spending-like tax preferences and found that, in 2007, they amounted to $600 billion. If you had included those preferences as government spending, then the federal government would have actually been one-fifth larger than it appeared. When you include both direct spending and tax expenditures, the U.S. has one of the biggest welfare states in the world.” However, David Brooks maintains that the Obama administration supported a simpler tax code even while operationally it has often muddied it up. Even though it would be coming up and is considered as hopeful, it definitely needs to be fixed and be more flexible. After that, he also adds two different methods which are Mitt Romney and Timothy Geithner. Nevertheless, these ways are kind of unreasonable, and the writer strongly appeals that shifting to tax expenditures and not just direct spending.

As far as I am concerned, I disagree with his opinion. The U.S government has just concentrated on bulking the appearance, as shown in the statistics, not trying to focus on the essential matter by using taxation or whatever. For example, basically the European does not have to make the choice of going bankrupt or dying when they get sick. As oppose to them, Americans, especially the poor where their country makes the biggest deposit of the welfare department in the world cannot help but facing the death if they have an even requiring minor surgery. In addition, there is a something wrong that “The Europeans provide welfare provisions through direct government payments. We do it through the back door via tax breaks.” Honestly, every health care purchased by business is provided by other private businesses. And while the tax breaks certainly encourage compensation in the form of health care, and they actually do not begin to cover the costs. Not only that, but I fully do not show pleasant to the writer’s example, which “Suppose the Pentagon wanted to buy a new fighter plane. But instead of writing a $10 billion check to the manufacturer, the government just issued a $10 billion “weapons supply tax credit.” This example is illustrating how exaggerated it is, and we actually do not anything like that. The use of direct tax credits to cover all the costs of a service is almost useless. These are the reasons why I somewhat disagree with the writer’s opinion.