Thanksgiving Reflections – Do we Get our Money’s Worth From Our Taxes?
by: Mike Ignatowski on November 25th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Although there are many great signs from John Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” one of my favorite ones has the following text:
Image from Rrenner
I HATE TAXES
But I like: Roads,
Firemen, some cops,
traffic lights,
National Parks,
the Coast Guard,
various TLA’s, etc.
So I pay them anyway.
(In this context I’m guessing that TLA’s refers to “Three-Letter Acronyms”)
During this Thanksgiving season, that sign caused me to reflect on the old complaint – “I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if we actually got our money’s worth from them.” Are the benefits we get from our taxes really worth what we pay?
Time for a little reflection on my life. I wake up each weekday morning and drive to work on well maintained roads, to a nice job that is only possible because we have a suitably regulated economy that is comparatively free of corruption. I received a great education thanks in large part to subsidies from various state and local governments. My family and I have access to great medical care should we need it, and we have a virtually unlimited bounty of food available at incredibly cheap prices. Most importantly and too often overlooked, we live with a sense of physical security and safety that must be incomprehensible to large segments of the world’s population.
Much of this wonderful life style is the result of the hard work of many private individuals, but it would not be possible at all if it wasn’t for the collective government work and services enabled by the taxes we pay. Is the life style I enjoy worth the taxes I pay? I’m not advocating for a large tax increase here, but when I compare my situation to what it could be in other circumstances, I can’t help but conclude that my life style and my family’s safety would be a bargain at three times the cost. For that I am grateful.
Hey great, this has been a awesome help to me, I have had some really strange issues in my private life recently and it is funny how little things can really pick you back up or make you look differently on the horrible things and get busy with the other things in life. Anyway thank you so much.
I would gladly exchange the 48% of our income that goes to private insurance to universal single payer. But for private insurance our family’s experience in life would be almost as nice as Mike’s.
The “problem” with taxes isn’t that we have them, and I very much agree with the author’s observations and thinking. The problem is the “rigging” by the owning class to construe and scheme and game everything to maximize the amount they don’t pay in taxes and reroute those tax dollars others pay to schemes that enrich the personal fortunes of the same owning class that runs the whole shell game.
For what we pay in taxes, we get a pretty raw deal other than the roads and firemen (priceless in California, especially in fire season)… as a lower class person the cops are usually the ones giving us a general hassle and grossly complicating or lives for almost no good reason, so I’m sorry I cannot include them in the list of good returns on investment. The rest of our tax dollars seem to go to the wars the rich want to keep and have so, not much return on investment there either. Our schools? well, in California, the rich seem to think our kids don’t matter so we’re subjected to “austerity” because the rich can live well within their means and thus demand that those with insufficient means illogically can do just as well as them….
So I guess that’s the stuff we’re grateful for tax wise… roads and firemen. That’s about it.