Revenue has a vital role

There are times when I am faced with a personal budget shortfall, when my resources do not match up with my anticipated expenditures. In addition to limiting my expenditures I work extra and generate additional revenue. Revenue is as legitimate an approach as expenditure to reducing deficits, and often they must be applied simultaneously.

What is missing from our current debate about government budget shortfalls is the word revenue.

The prevailing theory is that generating revenue through taxation harms our economy. The hypothesis has failed the test when one contrasts robust corporate profits with ongoing unemployment and state resources that appear to be perpetually dwindling. Recall that several years of lower taxes on the more fiscally fortunate members of our society, coupled with wildly speculative financial behavior in the private sector, produced what we have now.

It is time to seriously include revenue enhancement as part of a balanced equation to address deficits at the government level in the same way many of us do in our personal finances.

Ed Byrnes

Spokane