Write the check already!

Shocking news!  From WSJ.com: 

The Tax-Me-More Lobby Doesn't Pay More 

The same people who say they want to pay higher taxes don't bother to contribute more voluntarily. 

By Stephen Moore

I wish I had a dollar for every time a wealthy liberal has declared he thinks he should pay more taxes. That list includes Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Mark Zuckerberg and even Barack Obama, who now says that not only should rich people like him pay more taxes, they want to pay more. "I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me," he said of his tax-hike plan. "They want to give back to the country that's done so much for them."

...So why don't they? There is a special fund at the Treasury Department for taxpayers who want to make "gift contributions to reduce debt held by the public." But very few do. Last year that fund and others like it raised a grand total of $300 million. That's a decimal place on Mr. Zuckerberg's net worth and pays for less than two hours worth of federal borrowing...

...Liberals bristle at the charge that they are pro-tax hypocrites and even ridicule the idea that they should voluntarily pony up more in taxes when they lobby for tax hikes. Eric Schoenberg, a professor at Columbia University's Business School and a lobbyist for Responsible Wealth, recently told the Associated Press that "This voluntary idea clearly represents a mindset that basically pretends there's no such things as collective goods that we produce. Are you going to let people volunteer to build the road system? Are you going to let them volunteer to pay for education?"

Nonsense. Just because something is a collective good doesn't mean it has to be paid for out of coercive taxes. Central Park in New York is a collective good, but its remarkable renovation in the early 1990s was almost entirely financed through private donations, as have been many of our national monuments. Throughout history Americans have made heroic acts of patriotism, not because they were required to by law but for love of country.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have volunteered to serve in the military and many have given their lives on the battlefield. They didn't say: "I will only die for my country if the fellow next door is required to." During the Revolutionary War many Americans gave their fortunes to help finance the cause of Independence. But Warren Buffett won't voluntarily contribute to pay down the national debt? 

What liberals don't get is that there are patriotic reasons for strongly opposing higher tax rates. To name a few: Higher tax rates will damage the economy and throw Americans out of work. Higher taxes, history proves, won't be used to balance the budget but to finance government expansion. And higher taxes take the pressure off Congress to make the deep spending cuts that are so urgently necessary...

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703849204576303040425833126.html