What I Can't Buy With My Tax Break is an article written by Lynn Jondahl, Executive Director, Michigan Prospect for Renewed Citizenshiphttp://www.michiganprospect.org/the_michigan_prospect/2006/08/about_the_michi.html
There is a curious notion being peddled by political orators these days - that tax cuts are necessary to let people rather than government decide how they spend their (invariably "hard-earned") money. Just trust the people, not government, they say, to spend their own money wisely.
That notion might be relevant if we were talking about, say, vegetables. I could use my own money to buy my own mix of carrots, peas and broccoli or I could send my money off to government in Lansing or Washington to let some (invariably "pointyheaded") bureaucrat decide what vegetable I eat at each meal. The choice here would be obvious. I can decide better than anyone else, including, alas, my wife who likes brussels sprouts, just what vegetables I want to eat for dinner. Even the best intentioned, least-biased people in Washington cannot do better. And if we were ever to have a President prejudiced against one of my favorite vegetables like broccoli, for example, the results could even be worse.
The difficulty is that there are many other important things in life that I cannot buy for myself more efficiently than government can provide them for me. If I feel threatened by Saddam Hussain or some other aggressive dictator, I cannot go out and buy a cruise missile or an aircraft carrier to keep him under check. If the streets in our neighborhood seem unsafe, I might be able to hire my own private security service to protect our house, but we can't afford the services of one whole guard. We rely on our local government to use some of our tax dollars to provide police protection for our neighborhood as a whole. So, if government expenditures are cut in order to cut my taxes the result may actually be making me a lot less safe. Broccoli I can buy at a store, but safety is something I largely buy with my tax payments.
There are lot of other things I need to buy as a taxpayer beyond the traditional fields of national defense and public safety. I can't buy good roads for myself. I can't afford my own weather satellites to warn me of an impending storm or, even more important, to warn the farmer who grows my food in time to enable him to protect a crop or his cattle.
My father died from stomach cancer, and I'm eager for the federal government to provide the level of support for cancer research that is needed to fight that disease. Sure, using my after-tax dollars I can donate $50 to the American Cancer Society, but that will buy no more than $50 of research. When we as a nation decide to tackle this problem, then my $50 is joined with similar dollars from a hundred fifty million other taxpayers. Together we can fund billions of dollars of research against one of the great health scourges. That's not evil government, that's just common sense.
Our health depends in part on the cleanliness of the air we breathe, but I don't know how to buy clean air for myself. I can't do a "citizen's arrest" every time I see a smokestack belching black smoke. In fact, I can't even see all the pollution in the atmosphere. But as a voter and taxpayer I can join with others in the state and nation to support strong standards for clean air and energetic enforcement of those standards. During the last 30 years I have been pleased with how much cleaner our environment has become because we have together spent billions of dollars cleaning it up.
I spend a lot of time in my car, and one of the things that makes such time more tolerable, even pleasurable sometimes is National Public Radio. I can contribute some money each year to my local station, WKAR, but that only adds a few dollars to the cause. If the Congress and the legislature were to cut off all support for public radio, there is no way that I could come up with enough of my own money to replace it. Some people have suggested subscribing to cable, and that might help for television, though the programs still aren't as good as the best on public television. Cable radio would be helpful only if I never drove my car out of the driveway.
I also care about the overall condition of this country. Growing numbers of people living in poverty wastes lives. Like most Americans, I strongly believe in programs that assist unemployed adults with a chance to return to the workplace and that provide their children an opportunity for a good education all the way through college. If we cut student loans to provide a tax cut for me, I may have a few more dollars to spend on myself, but I will live in a harsher, crueler, more divided and less stable society.
Supporting government services isn't always a question of just helping yourself and your immediate family. My wife and I have each had one of our aging parents living with us for a while, and we became personally familiar with the experience many Americans have with elderly family members and the immense benefit from public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid payments made by the state and federal governments. We have no children of our own, but we eagerly pay taxes for the education that will do so much for our neighbors' children and for our many nieces and nephews.
It always is fair and smart to ask whether we have the right balance between private goods that we can buy for ourselves and public goods that only government can provide efficiently. If some political orator wants to describe a tax cut and lay it alongside a list of the government programs and services that would be cut or eliminated to pay for the tax cut, then I'm certainly willing to take a look. But don't try to entice me with a tax cut now and tell me much later how I'll be paying for it in terms of lost services and benefits. And don't tell me it's just a simple issue of letting me decide for myself how I want to spend my own money.
Posted on 09 January 1997 Michigan Prospect
