Hallelujah! Someone out there is listening!

After some of us complained that the GOP tax plan boosts taxes on many of us in the middle class, Ted Cruz has come out foursquare against tax hikes:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday criticized the House GOP tax plan for likely raising taxes on individuals in high-tax states such as New York and California and called for language to repeal the individual mandate to produce more revenue.

Cruz called raising taxes on people in wealthy, staunchly Democratic states such as New York and California “a mistake.”

Cruz has teamed up with fellow conservative Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in calling for tax reform to include language repealing ObamaCare’s tax penalty on people who don’t buy health insurance.

The provision would raise an estimated $300 billion to $400 billion over the next decade, which Cruz and other Senate conservatives say could be used to lower individual tax rates even further.

“There are some taxpayers who are losing exemptions, particularly in some high-tax states like New York or California that could conceivably be paying higher taxes. I think that is a mistake. I think tax reform needs to cut taxes for everybody,” Cruz told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.

There’s no “conceivably” about it, by the way. If this bill doesn’t change, many of us are looking at huge increases in our tax bills. My own bill will go up thousands per year.

So: three big cheers for Ted Cruz!

I have been complaining until I am blue in the face for two days straight now about the new GOP tax plan. First I noted that there is a moral case to be made for deduction of state and local taxes, as well as an issue of how two sovereigns share power. Also, I noted that many people who seem to resent those from high-tax states making use of SALT deductions are viewing the issue through a leftist prism that equates tax relief with government “spending.” Meanwhile, people like me, upper middle-class urban professionals in large population states, are looking at a per-year tax hike of thousands, even as multimillionaires look to be getting one new perk after another.

The common response to this is a swarm of people, each saying the exact same thing as if they just thought of it on their own: “Why should I have to subsidize California’s high taxation?” This argument is refuted in multiple ways in the two posts I just linked. Rather than just repeating it for the nth time, I commend those posts to you.

And I raise a glass to Ted Cruz for not falling for this lazy leftist-style reaction, in which the knee-jerk reply is to demand that other people pay more in taxes.

I’d like to see Cruz pushing for more spending cuts, too. I know he wants to, in his heart of hearts. He is the closest thing we have to Ronald Reagan in this era.

But he can’t do this stuff alone. We have to let government know that cutting spending is important.

In that vein, I’d like to close by quoting a comment I saw here yesterday. It’s from someone who lives in Texas and really gets it. The comment is passionate and blunt, and I absolutely love the spirit behind what this person is saying. I have bolded the parts most relevant to the immediate debate over the tax bill:

As conservatives we should be fighting for every single American to be paying less in taxes, period! This tax bill is an absolute joke. The constant talk about “tax cuts must be paid for,” or “tax cuts will raise the debt” — LIKE HELL! We gave control of both houses and the Oval Office to the Republicans. How about they act like it? CUT SPENDING. Pass a freaking budget! Start axing some out-of-control, bloated, power-hungry bureaucracies. Stop the go along to get along crap, and grow a pair. Washington is telling my family we need to pay more in taxes, but meanwhile the NIH just spent nearly $450K on a study to determine why gays and lesbians binge drink! Dissolve some agencies and start guillotining some federal jobs!

But seriously people, stop arguing that your fellow Americans deserve to pay more in taxes to the federal behemoth, it is NOT conservative!

Amen, brother. I could not agree more.

And apparently, Ted Cruz agrees with us.

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