Now, the really troubling part. Our tax code is insanely imbalanced already, with half the public paying nearly 100 percent of the income taxes. This mocks the idea that citizenship demands that each person pull his or her weight. Two generations ago, Americans celebrated success, and urged kids to do well and accumulate wealth. We're now on the verge of a society that cleaves into two classes: Those who pay taxes and those that get tax money from Uncle Sam.

Fairfax County’s affordable housing program provides housing opportunities to our neediest citizens: the disabled, the elderly and the poor. It also provides housing opportunities for lower income middle class working families. By partnering with the private sector and area non-profits, we have been able to leverage County resources to provide people who live and work in Fairfax County an affordable home.

A critical strategy for providing affordable housing alternatives to residents is that these homes are integrated into the community and dispersed across Fairfax County. Doing so prevents the creation of pockets of poverty. The concentration of poverty can perpetuate the causes of poverty, lead to higher crime rates and create unattractive, blighted and unsafe areas in Fairfax County.

Being the most desirable place to live in the region means the high cost of housing can prevent people who work here from also living here. Our affordable housing program helps us meet our goal of having homes available in Fairfax County for our working families, which helps us meet our economic development goals without adding to our transportation problems.

In several of the private communities where Fairfax County owns affordable units, we pay a monthly fee just as other tenants in those communities do. These fees go toward basic services such as maintenance, snow removal, and utilities. They also go to shared amenities. For example, 15 of the 41 condominium developments in which Fairfax County owns affordable units have swimming pools for their tenants.

Fairfax County cannot and will not ask private companies to treat tenants differently based on income. If a child in an affordable unit wants to use the swimming pool with his neighbors, he should be allowed to. We also will not ask private companies to waive such fees and interfere with their ability to be successful. Fairfax County will also not tell these private companies which amenities they can provide in an open, competitive market. These companies are very valuable partners in our housing program and we respect their right to choose which services and amenities they provide their customers and to charge appropriately for those services.

Recent criticism of these fees raises several questions. Should we concentrate our affordable housing with low income individuals and families all together, or integrate them seamlessly into the community as we have done successfully for years? Should we interfere with the free market and tell Fairfax County companies how they should run their businesses, or offer incentives to developers to help us meet our (and their) community’s housing goals?

Or should we completely do away with our affordable housing program and drive lower income and entry level workers out of Fairfax County?

One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending—tax expenditures—receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than spending. This paper explores the implications of that misclassification and illustrates how it can lead to higher taxes, larger government, and an inefficient mix of spending (too many tax expenditures). The paper then suggests options for reform to the budget process that would explicitly incorporate and properly measure tax expenditures. It concludes by considering ways to control tax expenditures (and other spending) and the special challenges presented by tax expenditures.

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And he did fear the government. He was a conservative of the old, libertarian school, from the days before the scolds had captured the levers of power in the conservative movement. He hated any government intrusion into people's private business. And he interpreted "people's private business" extremely widely. He detested the war on drugs, which he saw as a cruel and destructive breeder of crime and violence. He scorned government licensing of professionals -- especially doctors, who heard over and over again about how their incomes were boosted by restrictions on the number of doctors that made Americans sicker. He abhorred deficit spending -- again, he was a conservative from another era. He feared that cynical politicians could pretend that the costs of government were less than they were by pushing the raising of taxes to pay for spending off into the future. He sought to inoculate citizens against such political games of three-card monte. "Remember," he would say, "to spend is to tax."

This did not mean that government had no role to play. He endorsed the enforcement of property rights, adjudication of contract disputes -- the standard and powerful rule-of-law underpinnings of the market -- plus a host of other government interventions when empirical circumstances made them appropriate. Sometime empirical circumstances could win Friedman some unexpected allies. Left-wing Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is an idea straight out of Milton Friedman. Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's largest anti-poverty program: the earned-income tax credit, which was greatly expanded by Bill Clinton. And, most important, government had a very powerful and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary system working smoothly through proper control of the money stock. If there was always sufficient liquidity in the economy -- enough but not too much -- then you could trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or hyperinflation.

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