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.
