An interesting essay on The Economist:

… tax policy most certainly is a “morality play”, technocratic protestations notwithstanding. Questions about limits to the state’s authority to take citizens’ incomes through taxation, about the fairness of the distribution of the tax burden, about the legitimacy of the activities government finances with taxes, about the larger distributive consequences of the tax system, etc, are all shot through with contested moral/ideological value judgments. The problem of balancing America’s perilously unbalanced books is without dispute a practical problem, but it is a practical problem that must be solved within a climate of often tenacious disagreement about what is morally permissible and preferable in fiscal policy.

I hope to have more on this later in the week.