The long answer is more complicated.
Rush Limbaugh was a little ticked off a while back because liberals were asserting that Jesus would raise taxes, especially on the rich, which is, of course, a complete caricature of Jesus' teaching. Jesus wouldn't just raise taxes. He'd have made them completely irrelevant. For everyone.
The fact of the matter is, Jesus advocated complete liquidation of one's assets as a condition of discipleship. And after one did so liquidate, one would have no job to tax, either, because one would have to leave one's job to follow him.
Read the famous story about the rich man in Mark 10, paralleled in Matthew 19 and Luke 18, whom Jesus instructed to "sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor." Liberals like to stop right there, with the obligations this story places on the rich.
Few like to reckon, neither liberals nor Christians it must be said, with Luke 14:33: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."
Or with the calling of The Twelve Disciples, who left all and followed Jesus at his command, wandering around Galilee and Judea for something between one and three years until Jesus met his coup de grace, leaving their families unsupported for the time and becoming deadbeat dads in the process. A fine lot, they.
The truth is Jesus had only these 12 takers, and all of them proved to be something of a disappointment in the end, to say the least. Everyone else he called to discipleship found it a bit of a stretch, and followed at a distance, as it were, especially if a miracle feeding looked to be in the offing. The analogy would be to the Jewish proselytes to whom Paul preached his gospel, which they found rather more attractive than that whole circumcision thing required to become Jews.
The truth is Jesus had only these 12 takers, and all of them proved to be something of a disappointment in the end, to say the least. Everyone else he called to discipleship found it a bit of a stretch, and followed at a distance, as it were, especially if a miracle feeding looked to be in the offing. The analogy would be to the Jewish proselytes to whom Paul preached his gospel, which they found rather more attractive than that whole circumcision thing required to become Jews.
Jesus' radicalism makes a certain kind of sense if the end of the world and The Final Judgment is just around the corner, which, of course, would make practical concerns beside the point. "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on." "Some of you standing here will not taste death before you see the kingdom of God come with power."
This is the sort of stuff from which progressive liberalism, inspired by 19th Century liberal Christianity, tried to salvage something, denuded as it was of its supernaturalism and its apocalypticism. Inappropriately inserting their interpretation of a timeless Christian religion into American life, the progressives advocated a moral sensibility based on an unhistorical reading of the history of the religion, pretending all the while that only fundamentalists sought to impose a theocracy on America. In view of the high rates of taxation they came to advocate starting from 1913 (see here), one would almost gladly settle for the fundamentalists' theocracy with its tithe. What rich man in America wouldn't kill for a 10 percent tax rate?
Progressive taxation is a Christian heresy, arbitrarily ratcheting up the cost of discipleship citizenship the richer one gets, but never quite taking all the money, and never really justifying the varying costs in any given year, nor from year to year. Why is the price of entry at a lower rate for a relatively poorer rich man than for a richer rich man? Oh, progressivism tries to pretty this up with sayings of Jesus such as "To whom much is given, much is required" and the like, but at the expense of the full record which shows that Jesus demanded the same from everyone: a complete turning of one's back on one's former existence, no matter how great or how small by human standards of measurement. The Christian conception for this turning was summarized in a single word: "repentance." By contrast the paying of taxes in America is merely with reluctance.
In addition to this heresy, progressivism offers a related one which asserts that a better, improved future is just around the corner for all, if only the rich pay their fair share. This promise of an immanentized eschaton is a bastardized version of Jesus' belief in the coming sudden end of the world and of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. But the reality is, like the prediction of the end of the world before it, the progressives' expected bright future never arrives, no matter how much money they throw at it.
The message of Jesus was much more stern and demanding than you will find in any church in America, or in the tax-writing committees of the Democratic caucus for that matter. Jesus' message was both much more pessimistic and much more undemocratic than most Americans would care to hear, which is why you don't hear it. It assumes that though many may be called, few end up being chosen. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it." (Note to Rev. Rob Bell).
To a significant degree, that pessimism about human nature naturally animated the American founding generation, which ever sought to restrain human evil by recourse to divided government and divided powers within it. They were as familiar with the weaknesses of human nature through their reading of ancient history, literature and philosophy as they were through their reading of the Gospels and St. Paul.
They knew better than most men before them or since that you can't make men good simply by passing laws.
Paul in particular had written that sin was not counted where there was no law, but that when the law came, sin revived, and he died. The analogy from the tax world is similar: If you want to witness tax evasion, multiply the taxes. So funding the new government was going to be at best a tricky business. Which is one reason I think the founders decided to export the sorry business of taxation the way they did, imposing tariffs on foreign trade to generate government revenues, instead of taxing the population directly. They knew it was better to raise the ire of the alien who could be kept at bay than the ire of the countryman who could not.
It's a lesson we need to relearn, and fast.
They knew better than most men before them or since that you can't make men good simply by passing laws.
Paul in particular had written that sin was not counted where there was no law, but that when the law came, sin revived, and he died. The analogy from the tax world is similar: If you want to witness tax evasion, multiply the taxes. So funding the new government was going to be at best a tricky business. Which is one reason I think the founders decided to export the sorry business of taxation the way they did, imposing tariffs on foreign trade to generate government revenues, instead of taxing the population directly. They knew it was better to raise the ire of the alien who could be kept at bay than the ire of the countryman who could not.
It's a lesson we need to relearn, and fast.
