Why Taxes Are Good

UPDATE:

What really annoys me are all the people on the public dole, including Congress, sorry - the upper class of the military, and most of the highly paid "mouths" who tell us our news, who are annoyed when the public dole is given to poor people. These folks have terrific health care plans and excellent pensions, all paid for with public money. The gall of it floors me!

I love the one where higher level federal officials retire, and then go back to work for the same department as a consultant! That is wealth and resources that could be spread around. It's very bad policy: they are getting paid health insurance and pension, and then being paid some more....again from the nation's funds. Besides that, it's just plain evidence of a corrupt sensibility with respect to taxpayer's funds, that must reside in every cell of the governing "elite", in the executive branch, congress, state legislatures, Governor's mansions, the military, corporate America and the media. The incentives working for them means they don't work for us.

But to have some old white man (for the most part) looking down his nose at my need for comprehensive medical - and please, for God's sake, dental- insurance, while he's taking home millions from the public treasury, is so absurd it makes me sputter. I feel like Alice.

There's yet another type of double dipping: retired officials receiving pension benefits from the military and congress and perhaps from their stint as a state governor. They also have terrific health care plans for the rest of their lives and lifetime coverage for their spouses. How awesome is that! I don't begrudge them that. I just think we all deserve that.

It's part of the modern covenant between the people and its government; to not give all the wealth to the nobility. It's the oldest story in politics. Does the nobility prosper because the peasants and working people do without necessities? And yes, there is an American Nobility, and class is the driving force behind the American dynamics of today and the last half of the twentieth century.



To have poor women and children, the aged, the disabled, the depressed, veterans, all those who comprise the poor, without access to health care or homeless is an abomination that should not be tolerated in this country if we are to have any self-respect and any heart or goodness left. To have hungry children in your neighborhood should be inconceivable to an American.

To deny medicaid coverage to students in college, even if they are otherwise eligible, because they are "voluntarily poor," is just so dumb I can't dignify it with an insult. So, otherwise totally promising students may be forced to choose health care over education, just in order to stay alive or retain the medications they need to conduct their lives. That is just a ridiculous outcome for the wealthiest nation in the world, indeed, in the history of the world.

I refuse to accept it and you should refuse to accept it too. I reject any ideology based on the notion that people always and only make their own bed and should lie in it; and that the government has no legitimate role in securing the conditions of the weak and the sick, the elderly, women and children. It's the gentlemanly thing to do and it is still proper, and, amazingly, cheaper.



What a squandering of resources. We don't crunch the right data, we don't form the right queries, we don't know what to look for when assessing the costs of our policies. It is cheaper to build an apartment building in Seattle to house the chronic, hard-core alcoholic, homeless, than it is to leave them in the street. What the city saves in law enforcement, health care costs, social services, etc more than pays for the building. No one is required to stop drinking. It's not a moral mission to save souls and restore productivity; it's a quite practical mission to restore a semblance of dignity to people, provide for the basic human primal needs of clothing, shelter, and food, and thereby save the taxpayer money! Brilliant! Humanity, cost effectiveness, and leveraged outcomes go together, and lower and spread costs throughout the system instead of concentrating them in law enforcement and emergency services.





Enough. You get the picture....people collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal benefit are telling single poor mothers to shove it. That makes me sick. My conservative father taught me better than that! Who are these people? They are in no way American as I was raised to understand it.

MediCare should be means tested. So should social security. Why on earth would the nation pay social security to someone who is already collecting two full government pensions.

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When did taxes get such a bad name? I think we need to start a "Taxes are Good!" campaign. Remember, taxes build roads, schools, fund law enforcement, health care, all good things in the realm of the "public good," a largely forgotten concept. I say that all people on the "no taxes" hype imagine what it would be like if each of them had to pay for their personal firefighters, cops, security to protect their private property...oh yeah, taxes pay for courts and the whole enforcement mechanism. No enforcement, no private property rights. Arguably, and this is not my argument although I certainly see the sense in it, there are no inalienable rights until they are substantiated by enforcement. Therefore, the entire system of laws, jurisprudence, etc. is largely "welfare" for property owners. (See, The Costs of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes by Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes.)