Nobody is "giving" more to those who already have. They are taking less.
This cannot be emphasized enough. "Giving more money via tax cuts" only works if you have a construct where all income belongs to the government, not you, and it is up to the government to decide who gets what.
Yes, this is true if you consider a pure capitalist scenario where no one is entitled to anything other than what they grab for themselves. In this context "entitled to" simply means "I got it, hands off". If you're into natural law I think you'll find little justification that "any amount of stuff I have is mine by right, so hands off" could be construed as a natural human right. So in context of a pure laissez-faire system it's a right by virtue of it being decided as being the cornerstone of the system. But I doubt even among natural law supporters you'll find good backup for interpreting personal property as having no upper limit. However I actually agree entirely with your framing of things as not belonging to the government by definition; it's not theirs to dispense with, but ours. This is an important point. But it's a less important point than definition in the first place what "ours" is supposed to mean. If by "ours" you mean that a few very people will sequester vast amounts of property and wealth inside a fence and keep everyone else out, then I would advise that this is a recipe for catastrophe. If by "ours" one would mean that the people need to collectively decide how to apportion the materials of the world for the betterment of all, then that's different obviously.
At present the government serves a double purpose, and those two purposes are actually at cross-purposes. One purpose is to organize and dispense with the collective needs from a central position, so that everyone grabbing for their own gain isn't the result of 'democracy' (as the Ancients foresaw it would be). Another purpose is to perpetuate *itself* and increase *its own power*, which is apparently the fate of any large organization, regardless of what its purported goal is supposed to be. To whatever extent this second purpose is corrupt and inefficient, I would agree even with a John Bircher in suggesting that this needs to be stopped. And part of what makes this aspect so bad is corporate involvement in government, where resources theoretically the property of all citizens who contribute (tax money) is dispensed instead to interested parties who help those in government (corporate welfare, and in the case of a tax break, the 1%). At least the tax break is an equal-opportunity game, and in a sense merely returns the money to where it came from, neither better or worse for it. However that doesn't take into account the "ours" factor if we're considering the materials in the world in some sense to be a collective property. And I make this proviso specifically because in the event that one *does not* consider it to be such, then you devolve naturally into the scenario where there is no real right other than snatching things and holding on to them, which is a calculation purely of force: can you force others away from what's "yours" or not. When too much is in the hands of too few the calculations go off the charts and the guillotine comes out.
Therefore as a matter of pure strategy it would behoove the "unlimited power!" crowd to pass along some to the masses just to prevent revolt, and this has always been known to an extent. To the "collectively ours" crowd the calculus simply becomes to use that wealth as a matter of course rather than to let things become explosive before having to throw coins to the plebs.
But I would be careful with the nonchalant premise of "what's mine is mine", but it is so only at the sufference of those who live next to you. "Natural rights", such as they're understood, do not involve things like cornering the market, hoarding goods and property, or controlling the means of income of those with less power than you. It's certainly not what Aquinas would ever have understood it to mean, and certain not what natural law philosophers would likely mean by it. To whatever extent owning person property and goods is a natural right (and I would be inclined to agree that it is) this cannot stand as an unqualified definition without becoming nonsensical. As it's currently trumpeted it striles me as being little more than a carte blache to claim some moral high ground in amassing vast amounts of wealth and having the few dictate policy to the many. At that point you might as well call emergent aristocracy a "natural right" too.
Assuming one were to define "ours" as being more collective (and it doesn't have to be all or nothing on this point), the money being available is simply a factor of whether it literally exists and can be used, which is clearly does, because the government must have collected it in order to give it back. But if they don't even have it, and need to borrow against the Fed or foreign governments to pay it, then it's not a tax refund but a quantitative easing program of another stripe, which is a whole other kettle of fish. I'm operating under the assumption for now that a tax refund is "giving back" money that actually exists; this may be a fiction but for the purposes of moral analysis I think it should be seen in this way. And if the money exists to give back, then it exists to be used for other,
much more important purposes as well, such as those I suggested above.
And Lloyd, no, campaigns are not all publicly funded, or do you think that lobbying is no longer a thing?
