Best of Right Opinion

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• John Stossel: Communism Turns 100

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Star Parker: “According to American Enterprise Institute economist and blogger Mark Perry, some 70 percent of the federal budget, about $2.6 trillion, is transfer payments — funds recycled from one set of private citizens to others. Most of federal government spending is not about paying for functions of government, but for social engineering, meddling in our lives. According to the Tax Foundation, compliance with the U.S. tax code consumed, in 2016, 8.9 billion hours at a cost of $409 billion. Per Giving USA, total private charitable contributions in the U.S. in the same year, 2016, came to $390 billion. We spend more complying with the tax code than what we give in private charity. The $390 billion in charitable giving comes to about 2 percent of our GDP. The Biblical guideline for charity is the tithe, 10 percent. From this perspective, Americans sound stingy. Are we? No, I don’t think so. Much of our charitable spirit is swept up by government. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal government spending on welfare and anti-poverty programs in 2016 was $750 billion. If we look at our welfare and anti-poverty spending as government-mandated compassion, it comes out to almost twice what we give in private charity. Or about 4 percent of GDP. Government welfare and anti-poverty spending together with private charity amounts to 6 percent of GDP, getting us closer to the 10 percent. … Wouldn’t we all be much better off if we stopped using Washington as a massive social-engineering, money-recycling machine, and got back to a simple tax code designed to finance the limited functions of government, as laid out in our Constitution?”