The subject of the week in the blogosphere was certainly taxes and tea bag demonstrations. As usual some of the chatter was good and a lot just tried to justify ideological positions. If the subject is something that interests you then you need to develop a good base of information in order to reach logical conclusions. To help you get there, I’m going to give you links to three great articles.

All three of these articles are by Keith Hennessey. He worked in the Bush White House as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council and before that he worked for various senators on Capitol Hill. Don’t worry about the Bush connection, these articles are decidedly non-partisan. They aren’t policy driven.

Through the three articles Hennessey presents a series of graphs that will help you build your knowledge of historical tax burdens at both the federal and state levels, the competing tax plans of democrats and republicans and finally demonstrates the long-term issue that we have to deal with. You will be surprised to see how consistent federal tax revenues have been as well as how little difference there is in competing tax plans. Trust me, this isn’t wonkish and with his great graphs Hennessey will lead you easily through the issues.

Here is the final graph in the series.

This is a pretty dramatic graph. Why does spending take off as pictured? If you guessed entitlements you go to the head of the class. 

Do yourself a favor and take a little time to work through his work. At the very least, the next time you hear a politician pontificating about how he intends to manage our future problems you’ll be able to spot the lies.

Hennessey Article links: Article 1, Article 2 and Article 3