Spending Cuts vs. Tax Hikes, A Thought

I'm watching a Rachel Maddow segment about Arizona's cuts to mental health services, and it is provoking the following thought to me. I learned in my Econ 11 class that one dollar of increased government spending plus one dollar of increased taxes will increase aggregate demand by one dollar, because the multiplier on spending is bigger than the multiplier on taxes. This means that, purely in terms of the contractionary effect on the economy, tax hikes are less damaging to aggregate demand than spending cuts when trying to balance a budget in the face of a recession.

But I'm just thinking about the absolute human-suffering effects for a moment. When you cut Medicaid, people don't get life-saving transplants and they die. When you gut mental health services, unbalanced people are that much more likely to fall through the cracks and, uh, well, you know The Story of this week. When you cut firefighters, or turn the fire department into a feudal rent-charging racket, people's houses burn down. When you cut police, crime rates go up. When you cut government jobs, those people are out of a job. All of these are direct, immediate results of these spending cuts, and they all involve tremendous immediate human suffering. Frequently irrevocable human suffering, i.e. death.

What happens when you raise taxes? People, roughly uniformly across the community or weighted a little bit toward the more fortunate already, lose a wee fraction of their after-tax income. Unless I'm missing something, that just plain inflicts less suffering than spending cuts. Less immediate human suffering, less pro-cyclical contraction to the economy. Sounds good all around, doesn't it? But of course, no states are raising taxes to help close their budget shortfalls. That would be socialist, wouldn't it?