Tag Archives: taxes

Something Old, Something New…

Reading the news lately, I was reminded of the old rhyme for brides: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”

Something old? This morning’s Star had a story about the nearly three million dollars in fees being paid by the Ballard Administration for services in connection with the ill-conceived fifty year lease of Indianapolis parking meters. This may have been a bad deal for the city, but law firms and mortgage bankers did quite well. I believe this gets filed under “blessed are the deal makers, for they shall inherit the goodies” or perhaps the even older “he who has, gets.”

Something new? I vote for the absolute brazenness with which the current Indiana legislature has favored the haves over the have-nots. Although people who can afford to make contributions and pay lobbyists have always had an edge, this year the majority has been absolutely shameless.  The rhetoric has been about “shared sacrifice” at a time when money is tight. So they reduced corporate tax rates and made up the difference by requiring “shared sacrifices” from the most vulnerable: eliminating dental coverage for most Medicaid recipients, cutting the number of children who will be eligible for CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (despite the fact that 75% of that money comes from the federal government), increasing co-pays for infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities, and depriving poor women of desperately-needed healthcare by de-funding Planned Parenthood.

Something borrowed? Citizens Action Coalition issued a news release yesterday about legislative approval of higher profits for utilities, allowing shareholders of those utilities to “borrow” from the school corporations and municipalities–and ultimately the taxpayers–that will have to pay higher rates. That’s small change next to the smoke and mirrors that accompanied the Ballard Administration’s deal to sell the water company to Citizens. The deal allowed the administration to get a big up-front payment it could use to pave streets and make infrastructure improvements. That “saved” tax dollars, which will have to be “borrowed” from rate-payers later.

Something blue?  Indiana citizens.

Tea and No Sympathy

There is an old joke that begins “Why tax the rich?” Answer: because that’s where the money is.

For some reason, the current crop of Tea Party Republicans in Congress continue to look for money in all the wrong places. Their insistence on spending cuts not only ignores basic economics–the sorts of cuts they are promoting would reduce consumer spending dramatically, and throw us back into recession–the cuts they are proposing are mean-spirited and inequitable.

Paul Ryan, the current poster-boy for “fiscal conservatism” unveiled a budget that would eliminate Medicare in favor of “subsidies” allowing the disabled and elderly to purchase private (far more costly) insurance. My husband and I were watching his press conference, as he explained this; as my husband pointed out, in reality this would be a “subsidy” all right–to private insurance companies.

The GOP budget was all like this: lots of pain for the have-nots, lots of gain for the already-haves.

Now, my well-meaning libertarian friends will argue that it isn’t government’s place to help people. Private charity, they believe, will take up the slack. However naive I may consider that belief, it does not answer a more basic question: if government is supposed to simply “get out of the way,” if the state is to be properly trimmed back to function only as a “night watchman,” where are the proposals to strip away all of the benefits government is lavishing on the well-to-do?

I’ll consider those proposals to strip the needy of the last shreds of the social safety net when those “limited government” advocates also propose removing the cushy tax breaks enjoyed by businesses, the subsidies to obscenely profitable oil companies, and the mortgage deductions for second and third homes.

Until I see those proposed “cuts,” and efforts to make the effective tax rate on millionaires approach the truly confiscatory policies being proposed for the poor, I’m calling this what it is: despicable.

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Good Citizens

I have been asked to address students at an Indiana High School on “Good Government Day.” My assignment was to describe to them the attributes of a good citizen.

Here’s what I plan to tell them. (Constructive criticism is welcome!)

Good governments require good citizens. If there is one thing that history has taught us, it is that without good citizens to hold government accountable, power really does corrupt those who exercise it.

So the question becomes: what makes a good citizen? I think that there are three requirements topping the list: Constitutional literacy, critical thinking skills, and the willingness to pay one’s dues.

What do I mean by each of these?

Let’s start with Constitutional literacy. You simply can’t be a good, responsible citizen if you are ignorant of the history and philosophy of your own country. A week or so ago, Newsweek Magazine ran an article titled “How Ignorant Are You?” It was a quiz, with questions taken from the tests immigrants have to pass in order to become citizens. The percentages of Americans who could answer the questions correctly were embarrassing—for most of them, it was less than 30%. There are literally hundreds of other surveys that confirm how little most Americans know about their own system: two-thirds of us don’t even know that we have three branches of government!

If you don’t know what the Enlightenment was, and how it shaped our constitutional system, if you don’t understand that the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect individual rights both from government and from the majority, if you don’t understand the difference between civil liberties and civil rights, you can be a good person, but I would argue that you don’t know enough to be a good citizen.

Constitutional and historic literacy are just the beginning. You also need critical thinking skills.

What I mean by critical thinking skills is the ability to tell the difference between facts and garbage. One of the reasons that Constitutional literacy and an analytical mind are such important parts of good citizenship is that the world is a more complicated place than it used to be, especially when it comes to the oceans of information we get every day. The internet is a wonderful thing—I’m not sure how I survived before google—but because it brings so much unfiltered material into our lives, the ability to separate factual, credible information from spin and propaganda is more important than it has ever been. If you don’t know what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really say, or how the Courts have defined and interpreted what they say, you’re a lot more likely to believe that forwarded email you got from your crazy Uncle Ray.

In the last few years, we have seen incredible changes in the media. Fewer people read newspapers or even watch the evening news on television, and more and more of us get our information on line. Some of that is great, some of it isn’t. We are in danger of losing real journalism—where people monitor what government does, where they fact-check and provide context and background. Instead, we have mountains of unsubstantiated opinion, PR and spin. Good citizens have to be able to separate fact from fantasy. They have to live in the world as it is, not in a bubble where they listen only to things that confirm what they already believe—and the internet makes it so easy and tempting to construct that bubble. At the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, where I teach, we are so concerned about this issue that we have established a new undergraduate major in Media and Public Affairs. So far, it is the only major of its kind in the country.

Finally, the third quality of a good citizen:  Willingness to pay one’s dues—taxes. This one isn’t going to make me any friends, but it’s true. We’ve had 25 years of politicians telling us that taxes are like theft, that they are government stealing our money.  Not so. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a society that makes it possible for us to earn a living and live in safe communities. Taxes pay for everything from national defense to paved roads to air safety to garbage collection. Tax dollars pay for the school you attend, the parks you play in, the police and firefighters who keep you safe. Don’t misunderstand—good citizens are diligent watchdogs of the public purse, because there’s nothing virtuous or patriotic about waste or duplication—but they are also willing to pay their fair share without whining about it.

Think about a basketball team where some players just don’t pull their weight, or clubs you belong to where most of the members let a few people do all the work. Most of us don’t think very highly of the slackers. Good citizens aren’t slackers—they do their share. And that includes paying their share.

There are lots of other behaviors that characterize good citizens—voting, keeping up on the news, serving on juries, working for a political party or for a cause you believe in—all the things we mean when we encourage civic engagement. But if you aren’t civically literate—if you don’t know the basics of our history and constitutional system—your vote won’t be as informed.

If you don’t have the ability to assess the credibility of the news and commentary you are receiving, you won’t get the whole story, or the accurate account, and you will make decisions based on bad information.

And if you accept public services—police protection, garbage collection, paved roads, education and so many more—but you don’t pay your fair share of taxes, you aren’t a citizen at all. You’re a freeloader.

At the end of the day, being a good citizen requires a lot more than just being born in the United States. It’s more than wearing a flag pin, or being proud of what this country has accomplished. Being a good citizen means doing your part to move America forward, it means helping this country of ours live up to its highest ideals. And that requires civic knowledge, intellectual honesty and a willingness to contribute time, effort and tax dollars to our common civic enterprise.

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Debt and Taxes

It doesn’t take long for my students to learn that “it depends” is almost always the right answer to policy questions. The world is complicated, and questions about how government should operate are rarely black or white.

In an excellent column about debt and taxes, Morton Marcus makes precisely that point. Debt incurred in order to make investments in the future is good; borrowing in order to shift costs properly paid for with current tax dollars–is bad. Borrowing to invest in education, transportation and communications will make life better for our children and grandchildren, and will increase their ability to pay that debt. Borrowing in order to avoid raising taxes to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan does not make life better for future generations; it merely saddles those generations with bills that we didn’t want to pay.

The issue isn’t whether debt is good or bad. It isn’t even whether it is too big. The issue is whether the borrowed dollars were used to make wise investments, or were used instead to allow current generations to say “charge it” to the future.

With debt, as with so much else, it depends.

What Part of “Everyone” Doesn’t Sarah Palin Understand?

According to the Huffington Post, Sarah Palin weighed in on the Wisconsin protests in a Friday night posting on her Facebook page. In the posting addressed to “union brothers and sisters” (cough, cough), Palin says Wisconsin taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for benefits “that are not sustainable.” She says “real solidarity means everyone being willing to sacrifice.”

In Palin-speak, apparently, “everyone” means middle-class public servants. It clearly doesn’t mean those Americans in the richest 2%–the ones whose tax breaks Palin and her Tea Party buddies are so anxious to protect.

The Yiddish word for this is “chutzpah.” (Look it up.)

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