Skip to main content

Tax and Spend

Berkley MI
Friday

The phrase “tax-and-spend liberal” has always been a pejorative. It’s meant to be said with a sneer. With an implied middle finger. Ever since Bush 41, it’s been spit at anyone who thinks government might have an actual purpose beyond cutting taxes, eliminating regulation, and eviscerating the social safety net — the time-honored Republican agenda.
But I have personally adopted “tax-and-spend liberal” as a badge of honor. I actually believe in the potential of big government, as well as in paying my fair share towards its upkeep. I am not oblivious to its shortcomings and disappointments — if anything I expect them. But I get incensed when I see people in government who clearly don’t believe in government. Especially when they ruin it for the rest of us.
And damn, this is the moment where government should have shined. This pandemic is exactly what government is made for. This is why we pay our taxes. This is why we elect public servants in, presumably, good faith. It should have been government’s finest hour. Instead we’re being lied to, stolen from, and murdered.
Government was never supposed to make financial sense. Its job is to do what needs to be done. To protect us in a crisis, whatever it costs. To invest in the things the private sector does poorly — healthcare, basic science, infrastructure and, oh yeah, epidemiology. To oversee the financial and medical systems so they don’t break down under stress. To gather reserves of key resources in the good times because they might just come in handy in the bad.
Without a good, strong, well-meaning government, we are easy prey for diseases and bandits. And right now we have both at once.
If we’d taxed and spent the way we should have, we would certainly have handled this virus better. But ever since Reagan told us that “government is the problem,” we have been among the least taxed citizenries in the western world. Keeping it that way has been the life’s work of any number of Republican hacks (What rock is Grover Norquist under these days?).
But it isn’t enough that we’re under-taxed. Or that being under-taxed was already causing widespread and irreparable damage, even before the virus. Or that the treasury is being looted. Or that our people are dying in inexcusable numbers.
No, even that’s not enough for these bandits. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, with characteristic wryness, “Always grab much too much or you’ll get nothing at all.” The perfect motto for the GOP.
Remember the tax scam? The two trillion in tax breaks? I know, that’s so 2017. But the coarse venality of what Republicans did then is typical of what passes for government these days. Most of that tax break went to large corporations who then used it to buy back their own stock. A huge windfall for much-too-muchers, and a pittance for those with never enough.
In a desperate effort to make up for this colossal stupidity, we got a $2.2 trillion “stimulus.” Misnamed. It’s not a stimulus, it’s a rescue, and not much of one. Then last week, we got $350 billion or so for small business, however that gets defined. Apparently, the states will still have to twist in the wind — they won't get help paying their bills until Moscow Mitch heaves up another trillion or so. Add in the $2 trillion from the 2017 boondoggle, and we’re looking at roughly a $4.5 trillion down payment on a pandemic response that’s just getting started.
And all the while, tax revenue is falling through the floor. Unemployed people don’t pay taxes.
So by now it should be quite evident that tax-and-spend liberals are exactly what we need more of. Much more. The question is whether we can vote them into office before the much-too-muchers leave us nothing at all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

France and Britain Just Gave the Finger to Fascism

There is now ample evidence that people with democratic systems of government actually like them, and would just as soon keep them, flaws and all. There seems to be a strong backlash occurring in several European countries, a trend toward shoring up democracies threatened by toxic authoritarian forces. In Poland last year, then in France and Britain last week, actual voters — as opposed to deeply compromised opinion polls — gave a big middle finger to the fascists in their midst. I don’t pretend to understand the electoral systems of these countries — let alone their political currents — but I’m struck by the apparent connections between different elections in different countries, and what they might be saying to us. I’ve spoken before of Poland , where ten years of vicious minority rule was overturned at the ballot box. A ban on abortion was the galvanizing issue — sound familiar? — and it brought an overwhelming number of voters to the polls, many for the fir
1 comment
Read more

Don’t Let the New York Times Do Your Thinking

  My father would not live any place where the New York Times couldn’t be delivered before 7:00 a.m. To him, the Times was “the newspaper of record,” the keeper of the first drafts of history. It had the reach and the resources to be anywhere history was being made, and the skills to report it accurately. He trusted it more than any other news source, including Walter Cronkite. Like my dad, I grew to associate the Times with serious journalism, the first place one goes for the straight story. Their news was always assumed to be objectively presented, with the facts front-and-center. Their op-ed writers were well-reasoned and erudite, even when I thought they were full of shit. But there was more. The Times became — for me, at least — a sort of guide to critical thinking. It helped teach me, at an impressionable age, to weigh the facts before forming an opinion. And many of my opinions — including deeply-held ones — were formed around facts I might have read
1 comment
Read more

Democrats, Step Away from the Ledge

  Anxiety comes easily to Democrats. We’re highly practiced at perceiving a crisis, wanting to fix it immediately, and being consistently frustrated when we can’t. Democrats understand consequences, which is why we always have plenty to worry about. Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about consequences — which is, let’s face it, their superpower. I wasn’t intending to write about last Thursday’s debate, mostly because I post on Tuesdays, and this could be old news by the time it gets to you. But then the New York Times weighed in with a wildly disingenuous editorial calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the race, and the rest of the mainstream media piled on. In the Times' not-so-humble opinion, Biden needs to consider “the good of the country,” something their own paper has repeatedly failed to do for almost a decade. And since this is now the crisis du jour for virtually every Democrat who watched that shitshow, I thought I might at l
Post a Comment
Read more