'We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.'

"We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect."

Who said that? With two dozen new taxes, tax revenues increasing by $4 billion last year alone, and up to two-thirds of New Zealand working families now on the mooch with Welfare for Working Families, you could be forgiven for thinking that the statement above was used by Labour's Mike Smith or Michael Cullen to describe the ongoing electoral strategy of the Labour Party.

As it happens, it wasn't: that was the basic strategy of Franklin Roosevelt's 'New Deal' regime as described by 'New Deal' luminary Harry Hopkins in a shared confidence to a friend; over the years however in countries all across the globe several generations of suckers have signed up for the deal whereby they agree to try and vote themselves rich, and the governments they elect thereby have reciprocated by agreeing to the strategy of bribing them with their own money.

Watch it all happen again on Thursday -- and remember that as you listen to pre-Budget promises this week that every dollar spent by government, which is entirely unproductive, first has to be extracted by force from those who are productive.

TAGS: Budget & Taxation, Politics-NZ, Quotes, Politics-Labour