I went through the annual rite of passage that is completing my tax return yesterday. It’s never an enjoyable process and even when it turns out that your planning through the year leaves you in a favorable tax position it still brings up quite a few complex feelings about the payment of taxes, the role of government, the purpose of shared responsibility and each of our place in society.
It’s easy to hate paying taxes. It’s easy to object to how government spends the money that we are required to donate to the cause. It’s easy to demonize the process and make all of it sound evil and corrupt. It’s easy, but it is also inaccurate, as easy things most often are. The truth is that our taxes pay for a lot of things that make our way of life possible, things that we would have a very hard time doing without.
Taxes pay for our roads, bridges, traffic lights, stop signs, schools, hospitals, police, fire protection, emergency response, water, sewer, electrical grid, ports, airports and all of the shared pieces of the infrastructure that make our lives, our jobs and our communities possible. There is not a single business in the United States, foreign or domestically owned that does not benefit from the infrastructure that we all own and maintain with our taxes. Yes we all work very hard for the money that gets taxed, but most of us and the businesses we work with and for could not begin to compete without that infrastructure.
So here we are facing the highest deficits that the United States has ever seen. This year’s federal budget deficit will be almost 1.6 trillion dollars and now the GOP claims to have once again seen the light of fiscal responsibility. The tea party convention is in full swing in Nashville stirring up populist anger over the record debt and selling the myth that Democrats just want to tax you to death and spend it like there is no tomorrow. It’s a pretty easy sell to low information ideologues, but again, like most easy things, inaccurate. The fact of the matter is that the GOP has racked up most of the debt this country now shoulders and mostly during the years that they sold the meme that Democrats are tax and spend…
So I have a few questions for those screaming about the debt and what their taxes are spent on.
What DID you get for the trillion dollars spent deposing Saddam Hussein?
What DID you get from the 1.6 trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy? (hint: the answer is most likely $600)
What about the other side of that coin?
What DID you get for the 750 billion dollars spent to stabilize the banking industry?
What DID you get for the 790 billion dollar stimulus package?
Where would the country be right now if we hadn’t taken the extraordinary steps? How deep would the recession or even depression be? How many more Americans would now be out of work? How much lower would the tax base be? How would those factors effect the national debt?
I don’t like deficit spending but if you are going to do it get something out of it, infrastructure. Infrastructure in the form of an operating financial industry (obviously flawed but that is a different post). Infrastructure in the form of public works programs. Infrastructure in the form of investment in educating our populace, our most precious resource. Infrastructure in the form of reforming an industry that threatens to blow a hole in our economy that long term will be more destructive than credit default swaps… that’s right healthcare.
Healthcare costs have reached a level of absurdity. Collectively the United States spends more than 17% of all its money on health care. Personally that figure was higher for me and I am very well insured. Most other industrialized nations spend between 8% and 10% of their GDP on healthcare. How much more inventive do we have to be to compete? How much more productive do we have to be to compete? How much smarter to we have to be to compete? How stupid are we if we don’t fix this problem?
There are those on the right who say that taxes should not be used to ensure healthcare for all Americans. There are those on the right who feel that a free-market economy will solve everything. And yet the free-market economy has led us to where we are now and what do we have to show for it? A broken economy, record deficits, ridiculous levels of personal bankruptcy and a system that excludes increasingly more Americans year after year.
If the purpose of government and taxes is to protect and create the infrastructure necessary that we may all have full access to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Then why wouldn’t healthcare be one of the primary pillars of that infrastructure? Is protection of property more valuable to Americans than protection of life? The prospect that we should spend ourselves into oblivion to protect against terrorism and die for lack of healthcare is completely beyond defense.
Taxes and governance are complicated issues that require we have serious honest discussions. Americans must be given facts to accurately choose the priorities and policies that we collectively want to support with our tax dollars.
Or in other words… If your ideas of tax reform and responsible governance will fit on your palm, they are too narrow to be considered by serious thinking people.
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