The True Meaning of Tax Cuts
April 18, 2011
The following entry is part of a week-long series from our friends at Demos on a simple, yet too-often forgotten idea: Taxes Matter. They’ve taken a fresh look at some of the reigning beliefs, policy ideas and assumptions about taxes. All of it is worth reading. Go to: http://www.ourfiscalsecurity.org/taxes-matter/ for more.
Illustration by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch. Courtesy of Demos.
Imagine if Tea Party activists waved posters proclaiming their demands to “Shutter Our Schools” or “Pollute Our Air” or “Let Children Go Hungry.”
Those messages would have relegated them to the margins of our political space – and then quickly to the dustbin of history — rather than defining them as the politically potent force they’ve become.
Yet, is calling for “Zero Taxes” or to “Stop Taxing Us” so different? Does that not also demand that we ultimately abandon the very core of what has made America the land of opportunity, freedom and security? The problem is, without the public systems and structures that taxes pay for, America as we know and love it would cease to exist.
No matter what kind of place we call home—rural, city, suburb—our aspirations and expectations are inextricably linked with the public systems that provide for our quality of life. The basics of what we need to raise our families and to run successful businesses are now so ingrained in our daily lives that we take their existence for granted.
When we turn on our faucets, drinkable water flows. When we buy meat at the supermarket, it doesn’t make us sick. When we drive down the road, it doesn’t collapse under us. When we sit on a jury, we can free the innocent and put the bad guys away. When we send our kids to school, we know there’ll be teachers, textbooks and computers so they can learn. When we put our money in the bank, we know it’ll be there when we need it.
We live in America, dammit. Things work here. But, as certain as we are that things should be this way, we forget. We forget that environmental protections and fire stations, that public school standards, that clean air and safe drinking water, that banking regulations and Social Security checks—are all only possible because we, as Americans, have chosen to create these governmental structures and systems. And we have chosen to pool our resources to pay for them. We have chosen to do together what we cannot do alone.
Our Taxes Matter
We don’t have to love paying taxes, but we should at a minimum respect and acknowledge why we pay them. Yet without a single drop of irony, Tea Party members hold up their “Zero Taxes” posters on street curbs maintained with local government funding, lit with publicly-funded street lights, in front of public traffic signs, near publicly-maintained roads to protest efforts to fund our public goods.
They are not the first to miss the irony. For more than a generation, anti-tax zealots have promoted the idea that we’d all be better off if we each spent our money in whatever way we want. A favorite meme of the tax-cutters is that the American people know best how to spend their money—not the government. What they don’t explain is how each one of us alone is to maintain the highways, collect the trash, build and run our schools and colleges, establish and maintain our courts—basically keep a country of 300 million people not just functioning, but flourishing.
If you’ve already filed your taxes, thank you for supporting America. If you’re one of the millions who will be racing against the clock until midnight tonight, here’s some consolation: Your Taxes Matter.
