Bankrupt this guy and....
The current financial mess and Congressional hissy fit have
revived the grandest of American sports: ranting over taxes. It is the ultimate
Straw Man debate, though. Nobody, and I mean nobody, actually likes to pay taxes. Lefties want to keep
their dough just as much as the tempests from the Tea Party. As one of the
former, let me make it clear that this lefty doesn’t like paying income tax,
sales tax, excise tax, or backdoor levies such as vehicle registration fees,
phone surcharges, or turnpike tolls. A particularly loathsome fee is the $1.40
I have to shell out for 14 miles of New Hampshire I drive on I-95 on my way to
Ogunquit, Maine. Live free or die my ass–more like live like a freeloader off
of money gouged from the Bay State.
That 14 miles is partly what this essay is about. Every time
any sort of financial crunch hits, the collective reflex is to start ranting
over federal taxes–as if these exist
in a vacuum. The tax system is a big daisy chain–every dime you remove from the
federal part of it is going to be assessed further down the line. If there are
fewer dollars for the feds to give out for colleges, for example, state
governments are pressured to come up with the scratch. If they can’t, they tell
schools they have to raise their tuitions to erect new facilities, pay profs,
or dole out financial aid. Students and their parents then go back to the feds
and seek grants, but there are fewer of them, so they seek federal loans
instead, only to find out that there’s less money for these as well. So they
borrow money from banks, and what are interest rates but a tax under a
different name? If you can’t relate to that example, look at what has happened
to highway funding over the years. The interstates are rutted because the feds
don’t have the money to rebuild them, the bridges are unsafe because
cash-strapped states defer maintenance, and your street is filled with potholes
because local government isn’t getting any help from the feds or the state.
They only get money from one place: you! I now pay almost as much per month in
property taxes as I paid for principle when I had a mortgage. My state sales
tax has gone up 40%. I hate paying those things!
At the end of the day, though, it boils down to a single
question: Which master do you wish to pay? And that’s where the most naïve of
all tax debates takes place. Even the Tea Party thinks we need some services, so how do we fund them?
This question is where the Loony Right and the Batshit Crazy Left meet–they
both think small-is-beautiful decentralization is the way to go. In the
abstract, rightwing libertarianism and leftwing anarchism sound really good.
Let’s depend upon ourselves, or voluntarily associate with likeminded radically
free individuals and live in a society beyond government. The first problem is
that it’s all a bunch of romantic twaddle when put into practice, and the
second is that it ignores the reality that we need big government more than we need
small government.
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| ...you're at this guy's mercy! |
Spend enough time observing grassroots government and you’ll
come to appreciate why local and yokel rhyme. I lost my romance for localism by
observing the institution often upheld as the very model of democracy: town
meetings. You have no idea how seriously out-of-touch people can be until you watch
two grown men literally come to blows over whether or not to spend town money
to dump a load of gravel on a washed out back road! Nor can you appreciate the
depths of pettiness until you see half of a town vote to fire two reading
teachers, put buckets under a leaky roof, and defund art, music, and all
non-sports extracurricular activities rather than raise property taxes by .5%.
Think I exaggerate? Look at local schools–firmly under the thumb of local
control. To maintain certification, public schools must meet (ridiculously low)
state standards and the rest of a child’s educational experience is at the
mercy of local school boards and taxpayers. In the 1980s I taught in a Vermont
district in which texts were expected to last 15-20 years. (Try teaching
anthropology with a book printed in 1964!) Five miles away, in IBM-enriched
Essex Junction, schools spent more each year on videotapes than my district
spent in five for textbooks. Come to Massachusetts and walk the halls of the
new school in tony Newton. Then take a drive to Holyoke High. Still think local
control is a wonderfully democratic ideal?
Education is a big job–too big to be left to the whims,
budgets, and vendettas of locals. We really hate Big Government, right? Tell me
how well local government and private charities handled the Great Depression. Anyone
who wants to paint Franklin Roosevelt as a communist had better be prepared to
explain how the nation was better off under Hoover than under New Deal. But let’s
forget ancient history. Tell me what would have happened without federal
presence during the Deepwater Horizon spill, Hurricane Katrina, or
Hurricane Sandy. Each of those could/should have been handled better, but while
you’re spilling anti-FEMA bile, tell me who else had the resources even to
attempt tackling problems of this magnitude. While you’re at it, convince me
that the last recession wouldn’t have been much, much worse had it not been for
the American Recovery and Investment Act. Though I didn’t care for the
bailouts, many economists argue that the Troubled Asset Relief Program staved
off a serious depression. We should
debate how tax money gets spent, but we again come back to scale. Who was going
to take on the collapsing economy, your local bank? If not the feds, who will fund
vet hospitals, elder care, energy development, the NIH, the Centers for Disease
Control, consumer safety, or the military? (The very thought of the military makes the tax-hating right giddy!) Let’s
face it, without the feds, local governments would sell every inch of the
National Park System to developers.
We all hate taxes,
but don’t confuse what you like with what you need to do. And don’t be a yokel.
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