Brothers and sisters!
I'd like a reset on the notion of paying taxes
One year, while driving back from a solo visit to Missouri, I stood in a West Virginia phone booth and tried to be brave while my husband gently broke the news that we owed $3000+ on our taxes.
This was a while ago — before cellphones — back when $3,000 meant something.
Honestly, it still does. You should never equate knowing of someone’s existence with that someone being rich. I will always for my entire life hear a sum of money and judge its seriousness by whether I have enough in my checking account to match that sum. Car repair, leg operation, a country’s economy, anything more than what I have in my checking account sounds like $1 million to me.
Of course we paid the bill. We scoured couch cushions for change, robbed Peter (sorry, Peter) to pay Paul) and wrote out that check with hands a-trembling.
What are you going to do? The mistake was ours. We hadn’t had enough held out, and so there was minimal whining — which is saying something because I love me my whine.
I always thought that paying my taxes was a unique way to share. Paying taxes is my membership in to a world that won't let people die on the street, that insists on educating its children, that extends a hand to people who need it. When I hear "Cut taxes! Take home more money!" I don't hear "Cool! More money for me!" I hear school lunches not being funded, and farmers not being subsidized, and small business owners not getting loans because there just isn't money for that.
I know it's not popular to be OK with paying taxes (especially not where I'm from) and my taxes have often gone for things I didn't support (most wars), but even during the most corrupt of administrations (TFG comes to mind), I never thought I shouldn't pay taxes. That’s not part of the deal.
I also know the chattering class doesn't like words like "the collective," but I was trained in a hard pew in church to think that way: The all of us. What does this action do for the all of us? If you cut my taxes, and I get $54 more in my weekly paycheck, guess what I'll spend it on? Nothing interesting. But my $54 and your $54 and yours and yours and yours adds up to a big help for some incredibly worthwhile things, all because we share. It’ll pave the road, pay the firefighter, the teacher, the municipal worker who comes get my trash. It’ll plant flowers in the town parks, and fund the baseball programs there, too.
So yeah. I’m good with it.
And thanks, Lois, for the reminder.
I have a growing up acquaintance, a Connecticut native, who moved to a state in the south. He likes to gloat about the lower taxes he pays. I pointed out that one the reasons was that his new home state gets more back from the feds than they pay versus Connecticut which pays more than we get back. When I suggested he never totally left Connecticut because his hand was still here picking our pockets, he got upset. Go figure. Another person I used to go to for personal services would brag about how they registered their cars in the state where they had their vacation home so they could avoid the CT property tax which, by the way, paid in part for the schools their children went to. All this is similar to the “government, keep your hands off my medicare” mentality.
These folks aren’t poor, uneducated, forgotten, mythical stereotypes of the right. They’re not rich but they’re plenty comfortable. They’re thoughtless, selfish, willfully ignorant and greedy. They’d complain about the government if they got stuck behind the town plow on a snowy road. If you suggested they don’t care about the common good they’d get the vapors. And they are the perfect target audience for the anti-government propaganda that protects the wealthy and corporations from the truth about taxes and equity.
I just started reading The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee, which promises to address this and other inequities. Why are we getting what we're paying for? Why can't we have nice things? It promises to be a worthwhile read.