My estimated tax payments are due tomorrow. I've been self-employed for years, so this isn't new, even though they're irregular (estimates for Q1 and Q4 are due after the quarter are complete, while those for Q2 and Q3 are due two weeks before the quarter ends) and my income fluctuates from project to project.
But this is the first time I've really thought about where my money is going and how misaligned our priorities are, one big chunk to the US Treasury, headed to pay for a war we're losing in Iraq while community colleges around me lay off teachers and city hall shuts down firehouses and scales back on the Bay Bridge retrofit. Maybe it's time to become one of those misanthropic tax rebels, the exiles my grandfather used to gamble and play tennis with in the Bahamas.
Even when I earned a lot of money, I was happy to pay taxes. I grew up in a good liberal household; my grandfather revered FDR and taught me depression era songs ("Buddy, you spare a dime?") as we jogged around the house. Okay, he had his troubles with the IRS too, but it only made me more determined to do the right thing.
Taxes paid for roads, they paid for poor kids to go to college, if the country was in trouble, you created work to give people dignity. Sure, those taxes also paid for us to develop techniques for torture in Latin America, but those were Republican administrations allied with Pinochet, right? We were the good guys.
I never resented the dollars taken out of my fast food paychecks, especially not those for social security. Even when I seemed to pay more in taxes in the 90s than people like Tom DeLay.
I'm looking for something responsible to do on Thursday, to protest the inauguration, an event I did everything in my power to prevent. But it just doesn't make financial sense to me, to punish a neighborhood movie theater or cafe by not spending money in a city where no one voted for Bush in the first place. We need to be a powerful economic force, not a non-existent one.
This week, I answered our newly combative Senator Boxer's web survey about my legislative priorities for the coming year. Surprise #1: of the many choices, including protecting social security and reproductive choice and making health care affordable, my top priority isn't listed. Apparently we aren't fighting a war overseas, a war that's costing more than all my secondary priorities put together, more than the massive tax cuts, passing along interest to the future. Not to mention the war we aren't winning in Afghanistan against the poppy harvest, or the scouting we're doing in Iran (see Sy Hirsch's latest essay in today's New Yorker).
Two years ago, although it feels much longer, millions of us worldwide took to the streets to protest a war of choice. It was a brief moment of hope and solidarity, punctuating a season of imminent doom. I felt as if the world would end if we invaded Iraq. It didn't. But I discovered something worse--what if we went to war and no one noticed? How do we realign our priorities if no one wants to know?
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The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less. -Vaclav Havel