Our early presidents were an articulate bunch - that's what happens when you get a first-class education that includes Latin and Greek, all that stuff (and, in the case of Abraham Lincoln, when your insatiable appetite for learning demands that you do your math in the ashes of shovels propped next to the fireplace and reading by any available light, eyes be damned) - and I think the whole nation would agree that President Obama slides in there among those luminaries pretty easily, no shoehorning required. Which, of course, has always been a huge factor in terms of his attraction for people like me who ache and die in the realm of beatiful sentences, well-chosen words, powerful delivery, etc. President Obama is the man in that realm, period.
Well, it occurred to me that there's a great way for Obama to articulate how and why tax revenues are so vital to this country - a country, any country - by using the checkbook analogy. This is so basic, anyone can understand it.
You have money coming into your checking account (via paychecks or Social Security or whatever); you have money going out of your checking account (to buy whatever is needed or desired). Now, what does even a child of, oh, 12 years old get about checkbooks and family economics? That if more money goes out than comes in, there's trouble. This is where the president has failed. He hasn't stated this obvious, easy-to-digest truth at the heart of the whole thing. The nation's checkbook requires that taxes come in - they're the country's paychecks, after all - and as the paychecks shrink, so shrink the services on the business end of said paychecks. If the sum total of the taxes you're collecting are being squeezed out of the middle class (we'll call these lean paychecks) and you're not collecting what's fair, required or necessary from the upper class (we'll call these fat paychecks), the country's gonna go hungry and thirsty and start to lose its mind. Nobody wants to live in a country that guarantees hunger and thirst and insanity...well, except Kim Jong-Il and Republicans. They're already nuts, so they don't count.
Maybe Obama has used this analogy - maybe he said it on a Tuesday and it was forgotten by Wednesday or something. I don't know. But if he hammered on this, if he underlined it and boldfaced it and really made it clear what taxes really are, then the average person (who hasn't been bought and sold by Fox News, who isn't a Tea Party nutcase) would no doubt get pretty righteously pissed off, because this country of 300 million people absolutely must collect the appropriate amount of taxes from the 1% of the population who make/own more than anyone else, and who have agreed to live in America and share in its bounty. They are the keepers of maximum largesse; they should be heaving trunks of money into the national coffers. That's that. Amen. It's beyond fair, after all, because they have the most, and if you have the most you must give the most, which even babies exiting the womb acknowledge as an unassailable truth.
Thank you.