Tomorrow, the 16th of April, is my birthday. I started my first small business many years back. I was 22, and came to dread that my birthday, as it meant that whatever savings I'd accumulated had dribbled off to the IRS and I was once again broke.
So be it.
I chose creative freedom. No regrets. Not much savings, but no regrets.
Today the Tea Baggers will have their say, and most of America will groan about the taxes it is obliged this day to pay.
We need to change that.
I am reduced to cliches: You get what you pay for.
Too long government has rested in the hands of a party which does not believe in governing. Part of their appeal -- I am saying nothing new, and I realize that -- is that they argue we pay too much in taxes.
No.
We don't pay enough. If we paid a bit more, we could afford universal health care. We could afford smaller classrooms. We could afford to feed more of the hungry, here and abroad.
There are other policy choices we could and should make that might reduce our tax burden. I can think of one or two wars, for example, but that's not the point, not today.
And, yes, we should do a better job monitoring how our government spends our money, holding its feet to the fire in the same way our feet are daily held so that our jobs and businesses and homes stay above water. But that, too, is not today's point.
Today's point is this: We live in the richest country in an overwhelmingly poor world. We may not long be the richest country, and we may be mortgaged to the hilt, but we still have the bucks.
It is unconscionable that we allow the poorest among us to sink below the level of human decency. That we leave the poor, the mentally ill, the homeless -- and their children -- to wait in emergency room lines, to shop at foodbanks, to live without hope.
We can do better.
That's what I pay taxes for. That's why it is my strong belief that we on the left need to stand up and defend the proposition that if we wish government to work, we have to pay for it to work well.
Yeah, I hated writing that check and sending it off. (I liked it more than when my first checks went to the Reagan administration, I'll grant you that.) But I live in a place where I can see the unmet needs, the unfunded mandates. They can use my money. Our money.