When people don’t understand that taxes = services...

 Catherine recently talked about the importance of knowing that taxes equal services. I wanted to continue this conversation by looking at an article the New York Times published in February called Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on it.  In the article, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff travel to Chisago County, Minnesota, and interview middle-class conservatives who oppose government spending on entitlements, but yet still get assistance from programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

“Spending like this is simply unsustainable, and it’s time to cut up Washington, D.C.’s credit card,” Mr. Cravaack [Chisago’s Congressman] said in a February speech to the Hibbing Area Chamber of Commerce. “It may hurt now, but it will be absolutely deadly for the next generation — that’s our children and our grandchildren.”

But the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears. It is much easier to promise future restraint than to deny present needs.

“How do you tell someone that you deserve to have heart surgery and you can’t?” Mr. Gulbranson said.

He paused.

“You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing.”

He paused again, unable to resolve the dilemma.

“I feel bad for my children.”

This article is a powerful example of people making the connection between taxes and how services impact themselves and others. It also outlines the large, difficult decisions that lawmakers have to deal with when deciding the fate of public assistance programs every fiscal year. 

What also made this interesting was how the New York Times selected this area of Minnesota for their story. The Minnesota Post interviewed Binyamin and found out the county was selected by analyzing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Their analysis showed that Chisago “won” because its share of income from government and other baseline numbers most closely met national averages. Usually, conversations about taxes focus on entitlements for the poor or tax increases for the rich; however, this piece was able to focus on the middle class.

The Chisago area elects conservative officials, who support policies that would diminish the benefits of government aid. In essence, they’re voting against their self-interest.  Why? Since the Republican surge in 2010, this view of axing programs to control the debt, without raising taxes, has dominated the majority party in the House.  Taxes are viewed as one of the biggest problems by the Tea Party movement.

In a CBS News poll, 64% of Tea Partiers believe that President Obama raised taxes (even though he didn’t) and 63% get all of their information from Fox News.  This is a problem.  Before writing me off as someone who hates conservatives, I want to say that I believe fiscal restraint and prudent budgeting are worthy goals and that the federal debt is something to be concerned about. However, blanket statements that aren’t based on fact don’t help the dialogue that our country needs to have on how we pay for services.  If the Tea Party movement is to have any relevance, it’s going to have to have policy discussions that don’t write off taxes as the worst thing ever created by man. When people understand what taxes pay for and how government programs assist them, the dialogue on public spending will be more effective and beneficial. Remember, like it or not, taxes equal services.