Liberals are said to favor redistribution of your property, taking your money from you, the person who did all the work, and giving your money to the lazy bum who sat on his arse while you worked the long hours and took all the risk. Taxes are characterized as taking from you that which, by rights, belongs to you.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth of the matter is the government and the public are your partners and co-investors in everything you do. They make it possible. As rightful business partners in all your money-making activity, the public is entitled to be repaid for what they put in, and also to a share of the profits.
Whether you are a hard-working employee, a small business owner, or a large corporation, your entire operation is based on a large public subsidy, without which your success would be impossible, and you owe back a share of what you make to your business partner.
Your subsidy includes the roads and transit systems to and from your door, the education you and your employees received, the police and courts that keep others out and enforce your contracts, the regulations that keep others from fouling the air you breathe and the water you drink, and much much more.
You owe society for that investment. Your debt includes not only paying the full cost of those benefits, but you also owe a share of the profits. Your community invested to create the climate ripe for your hard work to flourish, and your social obligation is to return a share of the proceeds so that you get rich, and the society that invested in you gets richer, too.
Pay up and stop complaining.
If the recently elected fiscal conservatives are true to their word, the value of the services rendered by the government may soon become more apparent since many of them will be taken away. The infrastructure and educational system that has allowed the US to flourish in the world economy is starting to crumble, literally. From unfixed potholes to teacher layoffs, big government may be getting smaller if promises are kept.
But don’t worry too much. It will prove to be too difficult to raise taxes or make the necessary cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and defense. We’ll forget about taxes and deficits as we revert again to fighting over guns, gays, abortion, and theology.
Bravos! This is an excellent, concise rebuke to the Tea Party Know-Nothings, and any other anti-taxation zealots that we all occasionally meet and hear complain that “the government takes their money”. That they would not be able to make their money without the government won’t even occur to them.
Well done.
As an occasional spectator of U.S. politics I don’t know the details of the underlying discussion. Of course taxes are needed and can be applied fairly. Going against that is demagogy and the economic history of America and the World should be enough to show that clearly.
But the pro-tax argument can appear to be equally shallow and eventually be counterproductive if presented in too simple a manner. In some other countries, at least, the real discussion is not whether to pay or not to pay, but rather how reasonably the State is acting when increasing (or decreasing) taxes. What is the basis for a specific % increase; why a certain pattern of tax rate distribution; how do tax raises compare, quantitatively, to other tools available to generate revenue and, for example, balance a deficit? Especially since States, while able to convincingly argue they are the taxpayer’s business partner – as presented here – with a right to share the “proceeds”, in fact have a unilateral capacity to determine how those proceeds are distributed. It’s an assymetrical relationship and one has to be careful in arguing we should just “pay up”, at the cost of implicitly legitimizing unfair or criminal behavior by Governments.
You owe society, but the difficult question is how much you owe and who determines that.
This is a refreshing antidote to the religious argument about whether taxes are inherently evil. It should be obvious to any rational person that there are some things that need to be done by the community. The extent of those things and the relative efficiency of government vs. the private sector are matters for discussion, but I think the Tea Party types are misleading to imply that the “founding fathers” were against government of any kind.
One thing I would like to see discussed in a non-partisan way is the effect of tax rates and income distribution on economic growth. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are so far apart on this issue that they seem to come from different planets where even the laws of physics are different.