A line in a WRAL news story on the economy today hit on something I’ve discussed before:

Government revenues are sacred. No matter what happens in the greater economy, they must not be negatively affected. Families tighten the belts, businesses cut costs, but governments find new ways to tax.

WRAL, which also ran a story today about how Wake County officials are dealing with the economic downturn (headline: “Wake leaders talk taxes to balance budget“), put it this way:

The economy shrank at a 3.8 percent pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, as the deepening recession forced consumers and businesses to throttle back spending.

That’s right; when times get tough, we throttle back spending. Government officials, meanwhile, seek to throttle us. So we end up not only trying to conserve scarce economic resources for our families, but also being forced to fork over even more to federal, state, and local governments because their budget writers can’t fathom “throttling back” on anything.

These past few weeks, for example, the “Committee of Hogzillas” has chased several new tax ideas for North Carolina, including a tax on miles driven in your vehicle (this would be in addition to the gasoline excise tax), a tax on digital downloads, taxes for trains,
and new taxes on alcohol and tobacco.

As I have done in previous posts, I have provided a handy chart to help show the relationships discussed here (click the graph for a larger version):

Notice that silly new tax proposals are a constant until shortly after recession hits.