After a middling struggle, I got my tax returns filed a day early this week. For me, that's almost an epic accomplishment. I'm even anticipating a refund this year, thanks to a large credit for installing a solar water heating system. Yes, I'm feebly trying to go green. That's not easy, since nearly everything I do or use involves the use of fossil fuel energy, directly or indirectly.
But I digress.
One of the points of this screed is that, pain in the ass though it may be, I'm with the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization." Unfortunately, that simple point seems to elude the vast majority of Republicans, particularly those of the Tea Party persuasion. As illustration, I will offer the recent funding cuts imposed on the Federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This is ostensibly to help curb the Federal budget deficit, which has come to terrorize the Republican imagination ever since President Obama's ascension to the Presidency, although for some strange reason not before.
The reality, of course, is different. The cuts are to punish the IRS for allegedly unfairly scrutinizing the bona fides of "conservative" (read "reactionary"), ostensibly charitable, groups seeking tax-deductibility for their donors' contributions. Given the GOP's sorry track record of playing fast-and-loose with such trifling hindrances as campaign limitation and disclosure laws, it does not seem unreasonable to give applications from such groups a thorough vetting. Personally, I think kudos should go to the employees having the gumption to do so.
But with consistent hypocrisy, the GOP poobahs are in high dudgeon over IRS "abuses," although they have found no evidence of any conspiracy, or even knowledge by high agency executives, of the alleged bounds-overstepping by low-level functionaries.
Nevertheless, said poobahs have determined to punish the entire agency for the sins of its employees by cutting agency funding. It does not seem to have occurred to them that this is akin to excising one's nose to spite one's face. By cutting funding, one renders the agency less able to perform its function of collecting taxes owed, and thus it contributes to what? Oh, the deficit! Well--who'd a thunk that!
But beyond the IRS debacle, the GOP antipathy to taxes is increasingly leaving the nation in peril. To take another example, the increasingly woeful state of the national infrastructure--specifically roads and bridges, is threatening an inevitable breakdown of the national economy. Such a large part of goods and services depend on movement over these structures that a serious outage would bring down the entire system. Yet, year after year, virtually nothing is done, and the GOP doggedly resists any real program to remedy the situation.
Now to my second point. Any half-way objective observer can see the reality of the current state of affairs, and it's far from pretty. So the Latin phrase comes to mind--cui bono? Who are the beneficiaries of this mess? It sure as hell isn't the average wage/salary earner whose compensation has remained flat for close to a decade.
The obvious answer is the already obscenely rich, whose share of the national income and wealth has been increasing over the same period. And the GOP House of Representatives just attempted to give them an added boost by repealing an already pittance of an estate tax. It's quite obvious these people are mere lackeys of the super-rich, the Koch brothers being the prime example of their masters.
The surprising thing is that too many of the poor schmucks have been aiding and abetting the top leaches by voting for their lackeys. One wonders how long it will take before they realize how they've been conned and swindled. As Mark Twain said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And one of those rhymes is that when wealth inequality becomes too wide and obvious, the plebs will rise and kick over the existing order. What succeeds may be better or worse, but one thing is pretty certain: the old top dogs are going to suffer.
There's a recent video from the web site "Addicting Info" that should give the leaches and their lackeys a case of the fantods. An erstwhile Tea Party adherent is coming to the realization he's been voting against his own interests. He (at long last) recognizes the GOP has been doing nothing for him, and the Democrats have. Watching him grappling with the cognitive dissonance is almost painful.
He is only one man, but if he can recognize how he's been duped, the odds are others will follow. How long the process may take can't be predicted. But I think it will happen, and when it reaches a tipping point, the Koch's and their ilk had better watch out.
Of course, other forces could crash the entire system before an uprising. But that's another story.
Further affiant saith not.