Issue #16, Spring 2010

Can’t Wait ‘Til Tax Day!

It’s a heretical thought, but would people pay more taxes if they could designate where a portion of their money went?

Ethan Porter

I dropped a check for $800 in the mail, and I had no idea where my money was going.

Well: I knew that it was headed to the U.S. Treasury, and that, eventually, it would be spent by the federal government. But that was all I knew. This was last year, the first year in which the IRS didn’t grant me a refund, but instead required me to write a check. Of course, I’m a liberal who had never bristled at the notion of paying taxes, considering it a social duty on par with loving your parents and, later in life, providing for your children. Even today I’d have little complaint about paying more taxes. Yet coming face-to-face with the unaccountable leviathan popularly referred to as the U.S. tax system was a revelatory experience. I had made what was, for me at least, a not insignificant contribution to the federal government. But judging by the government’s response, I might as well have thrown my money away.

Access to an incredible array of goods and services, not to mention the right to live in a well-ordered, prosperous society, is what you get in exchange for paying taxes. The federal budget totals between $3 and $4 trillion a year, covering national security, Social Security, and everything in between. I get this. And most Americans, I imagine, have a similar understanding–they know that, even when it’s spending $30,000 on a toilet seat, the federal government is doing something with their money. They just don’t know exactly what.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When I return a movie to Netflix, the company e-mails me to let me know when it has received the film. And when I purchase almost anything–any good or service–I am provided with a receipt, which shows not only proof of purchase but also documents what, precisely, I have bought. Yet I didn’t know that the Treasury had received my money until the check cleared my bank account. And I was never provided with a receipt documenting what I had received in exchange for it. It’s often said that our government is stuck in the twentieth century; in this area, at least, that complaint would be charitable.

For too many, government is either an abstract notion or a source of irritation; you either can’t understand what it’s spending your money on or it’s wasting it altogether. As a result, feeling disconnected from their government, people tend to turn on, tune in, and drop out–witness our comparatively low voter participation rates, or people’s befuddlement when asked their opinion of the federal government. A Gallup poll last year reported that almost half of Americans rate their federal agencies as "neutral," which, it reported, "could be a reflection of Americans’ ambivalence or an indicator that Americans haven’t had enough experience with a federal agency to rate its overall performance." And without the check and the balance of an active public, government performance suffers.

A vicious cycle is born, turning people’s distance from government into a reason for disengagement, which in turn causes poor performance–which only pushes the government back further, and justifies the initial disengagement. Accountability, traditionally the idée fixe of democracy, is undermined. And the progressive project, which trumpets an affirmative vision of government, is devastated.

We are telling the government, ‘Screw you!’" Howard Jarvis, tax rebel extraordinaire, exclaimed to reporters. The year was 1978, and Jarvis’s beloved Proposition 13 was on the fast track to passage as a ballot initiative in California. After it was approved by voters that fall, Prop 13 severely curtailed state and local governments’ ability to collect property taxes and required that future legislatures approve any tax increases by a two-thirds majority. We know what’s happened since. California has become a basket case, confronting near-annual budget crises by axing services, with a legislature in constant gridlock. This past summer, the state found itself in such bad shape that it was forced to rely on IOUs, rather than real money, to meet its obligations.

Around the time Prop 13 passed, Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California–the Golden State has an outsized role in our current misery–was preparing for another run at the White House. Just as he had done during his 1976 run, in 1980 Reagan excoriated the "welfare queens" who cheated the tax system for Cadillacs and hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeserved welfare checks. He was the Pied Piper of the anti-tax movement, and he rode public anger about taxation and perceived runaway government spending to victory. Prop 13 had, in the words of Time magazine, prompted "tax-cut fever [to] spread across the nation like an exotic strain of flu."

Over time, this flu infected both political parties, eventually reaching almost the entire body politic. Tax rates have fallen dramatically since Reagan’s 1980 victory: The top marginal rate, for example, has been cut precisely in half, from 70 percent to 35 percent. Even so, taxes are only more loathed, and government more derided, than they were 30 years ago. Even Barack Obama, in the dwindling days of his presidential campaign, was forced to resort to full-throated cries for broad tax cuts. Joe Biden’s claim during the campaign that paying taxes is "patriotic"–which, insofar as it equates taxes to civic responsibility, is true–was instantly derided as a gaffe, even within the Obama campaign. Some of this opposition is an honest, understandable response to real waste. Some of it is racial; your tax money, says the subconscious of many American voters, isn’t just wasted on overpriced toilet seats and money for the poor–it’s wasted on poor people who don’t look like you.

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Issue #16, Spring 2010
 
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Elisamatt:

I love this!



Ethan, you so coherently put into words many ideas I have had like this over the years.



I'd like to use property tax vouchers as an example. As a property owner in an upper middle class suburb which offers an impeccable public school system (which is why we moved here), we pay around $15,000 in "pre-tax" dollars per year in property tax, or $24,000 in actual earned income.



When the current financial crisis hit and it suddenly became mandatory for many, even in this affluent 'burb, to sell their expensive houses, they quickly found out that they wouldn't be able to--and not just at the level of difficulty homeowners in the rest of this city were experiencing.



That is in part because, even in this conservative red state where house values have historically hardly changed at all, these expensive houses have rocketed downward in real value.



Sales in this suburb are lagging well behind even those in the other affluent suburbs in this city.



Why? The TAXES!



Potential buyers can get more house and can stash their kids in a "good enough" public school, or even opt to spring for a private school, and still not come close to paying the what we have shelled out FOR YEARS to live here--either in the initial investment of the cost of the house or the taxes.



Thanks to the lousy economy and the less than ethical actions of the former administration, our hard earned retirement funds are in jeopardy. How nice it would have been NOT to have had to spend the money we did for our children's education ALONG WITH the property tax. Okay, so it was a choice. Like food is a choice.



We could be using that money now to stoke up our "portfolio"--what a joke!



So what do I get for my property taxes here? I get, I kid you not, nice guys in white uniforms who drive little white trucks up to my garage door to empty my garbage cans. They will even go into the garage (you have to provide the code for the security system or a flang that opens up the garage door), or the HOUSE (with permission--and only if the garbage is consolidated into big cans) to empty my trash. I get nearly instantaneous snow removal. I get immediate and courteous response from the police and the fire dept. I get a fabulous public library (though the public library belongs to the county, my branch is housed in a gorgeous building and seems to have a lot more books in number and variety than, say, branch libraries in poorer areas of the city). There are also numerous other perks which are definitely NOT necessary but NICE. You know, like what those rich folks have always had.



This suburb has a public school system which is, I believe, number one in the state, and affords numerous "special needs" services (how painful it is to write that).



This became acutely important to us when we discovered, to our dismay, that both of our children have learning disabilities. I will not use the more politically correct phrase, "learning differences," although that, too, is an accurate term. The learning disabled have great difficulty even muddling by in their areas of unseen disability, but can be absolutely brilliant in other areas. Those with "learning differences" need to have the material tweaked into a different shape to aid comprehension, which is certainly important and necessary.



But the difference is akin to the difference between "frustration" and "agonizing humiliation that leads to juvenile delinquency."



The term is "gifted learning disabled," which, in short, means that we have very bright children who initially could not read a word. They had other problems, too, and even though initially we had absolutely NO IDEA where such problems could have come from, genetically speaking, that was only because both of us are experts in denial and suppression.



It turns out that many of our early educational experiences were so painful and humiliating that we simply did not remember them--and both my husband and I went on to earn advanced degrees.



The kids are doing okay, thanks--looks like they both will graduate from college and are good enough at reading, writing, and math to earn a living. Occasionally though, and in unexpected ways, they comprehend some things with such a crystal clarity that the beauty of it takes my breath away. Then I know what peace is.



It was a huge worry, for at least a decade, that they might not be able to earn their own living. Now, both may choose to go on to grad school, but not because they feel they HAVE to, as I did, in order to prove my intellectual worth to people who at one time, I considered important. That effort was in vain, sadly.



What has this got to do with tax vouchers? Plenty. Both of my children spent four years each in an enormously expensive private school for the learning disabled. This school saved their intellectual lives. We are not divorced because of this school. Our children are becoming reasonably happy adults who are getting on with their lives, because of this school. I send all spare pocket change to this school and give generously to their Annual Fund (at least I did before the Bushie catastrophe).



At the time they went to this school, though, it cost us $12,000/per year/per child in "pre-tax" dollars, which meant we spent $18,000 for each child in earned income to send them there. That school now costs $21,000/per year in "pre-tax" dollars, or $27,000 in earned income.



And it is worth every dime.



They couldn't stay there forever, though. It only goes through the 8th grade. My son, the eldest, graduated from our suburb's public high school, but my daughter, three years later, went to another private school. The private school was far superior. Had we known then what we know now, we would have bought an inexpensive house in the city and sent them both to the private high school.



No public school system can provide for all of the needs of all kinds of children. I sure wish I could have directed my property tax towards that tuition rather than paying private school tuition AND property tax.



Would this mean the end of public education? Not a chance. It might mean the end of mediocre or inept public school systems, but I won't hold my breath on that one.



Many of the less than wealthy in this city opt to pay tuition to Catholic schools rather than send their children to the big city public school system.



When I first moved here, I thought that fact was exceedingly strange.



This was because my Catholic school education was, uh, lacking. It got off on the wrong foot when the nun who taught first grade told my father that I was mentally retarded because I couldn't learn to read. Mind you, this pronouncement was made without the I.Q. testing that was so popular in the 1950's. Lucky for me that he didn't believe her and taught me how to read himself.



Still, he was so convinced of the moral superiority of a Catholic education that he would have had me continue until I dropped out. Fortunately, my mother put her foot down, ostensibly because of the tuition, but also because of the class size, which in those baby-boom days, numbered 54 children. There was one teacher and no aides. With my undiagnosed learning disabilities, this was not a good combination.



However, it turns out that Catholic schools in this city really do provide a better option for these parents and their children than the big city public schools. It seems that Catholic schools may have improved somewhat since I attended them (there are hardly any nuns teaching anymore, which is a huge improvement), while public schools have degenerated, victims of the impossible demands of an increasingly diverse population.



I have worked hard all my life in a "helping profession." I thought paying taxes was part of what socially aware people did, more-or-less without complaint.



But I would much rather fund "special ed" than garbage pick-up. I can handle the garbage cans, guys--it's nasty, but I can do it.



And on the federal level? I would MUCH rather fund, say, the EPA, than buy a nuclear missile.





BTW: Sarah Palin makes my skin crawl, and I've never been to a Tea Party event.



Mar 23, 2010, 2:39 PM

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