July 13, 2011 10:52AM # One Difference between Statists and Non-statists By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE A non-statist would never write something like this: > We had a big surplus. It was time to do something with it. Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration official and an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, didn’t want to see the surplus spent on tax cuts. He wanted to see it spent on public investments. To a statist, all resources belong to the state. The government doesn’t *tax* 40 percent of your earnings; it magnanimously spends the other 60 percent on you. When the government reduces your taxes, it isn’t taking less money from you; it’s spending more of its money on you. The above quote comes from an article titled, “[We Have a Taxing Problem, Not Just a Spending Problem](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/we-have-a-taxing-problem-not-just-a-spending-problem/2011/07/11/gIQAkUfZAI_blog.html).” But since statists believe that *not taxing* equals *spending*, both halves of that title actually mean the same thing: “We Have a Not-Taxing-You-Enough Problem.” ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).