My brother recently gave me a copy of Successful Farming magazine from 1951, and it’s been a lot of fun to look through. I’ve found ads for most of the tractors we once farmed with, as well as ads for a lot of products – mostly kitchen related — that are still going strong today. Ads for Calumet Baking Powder, Shredded Wheat, Cream of Wheat and Pillsbury Flour all look pretty much the same, demonstrating, I guess, that the “more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Bolstering this notion was an article about all the poor farmers in rural areas who weren’t producing enough to feed themselves. As a result, they were receiving government support, support that came from the tax dollars of farmers and factory workers who were “productive citizens.”

It’s really interesting to see the map of where all these “Hillbillies” – as they’re depicted in the article — lived. Virtually everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line was suffering from poverty and underproduction (as was north central Nebraska) with Appalachia and the Ozarks having it the worst.

The article urged the government to relocate these un-productive farmers to the industrialized Midwest where they could work in factories. This way good farmers could take over the vacated land and production could be increased. And making these people work harder for a living would reduce the burden they posed to taxpayers.

The stern tone of the article and the no-nonsense solution it advocated – moving less-productive people off their land whether they liked it or not — was a reminder of how little conservatism has changed in the past 63 years. Or so I thought until I ran across another article. And though this article prefigured today’s calls for a balanced budget by advocating an end to government debt, it explained that the only way this would be possible would be to raise taxes. It went on to list all the ways that higher taxes would be good for the nation. I nearly fell off my chair!

Here, for once, was an honest acknowledgment that balancing the budget requires raising taxes. Yes, the magazine acknowledged in one place, it would be great if everyone was a productive wage earner and programs to help the poor could be reduced. But there was no attempt to substitute this for raising taxes.

I, like most people, don’t like paying taxes. But I spent too many years going to Sunday school to accept today’s notion that throwing our neediest neighbors under the bus is morally, ethically and spiritually preferable to paying more taxes. I’ve yet to hear anyone say churches should stop helping disadvantaged people so parishioners can put less money into the collection plate each Sunday. But a lot of people today think this is exactly the approach the government should take when it comes to social programs.

When adjusted for inflation, Americans are paying about the same amount in income taxes that they were when this article was written in the early 1950s. Yet that wasn’t enough tax revenue to avoid a deficit then and we are living in a very different world now.

And among the differences between then and now is that today the people who demand a balanced budget and that the poor work their way out of poverty no longer comprehend the importance of paying taxes if we want our nation to be strong.

The more things change, I guess, the more they change – where once conservatives understood the importance of taxes in balancing the budget, that’s no longer the case today.