Raising Taxes to Make Society Better

I am impressed by the fact that there seem to be a huge number of people out there in our state of Michigan (members of both parties) who are not very well educated, and who think of "government" as something quite other than and quite apart from themselves. Consequently, their basic stance is that the smaller the amount of taxes they pay the more they personally take home and the less they have to "bother" with the government.

It's as if they're saying "starve the greedy bums and they'll go away." What they just don't understand is that the government is all of us; we all have a responsibility to the communities in which we live to share the cost of the very necessary services we organize on our own behalf. And I think it's simply because nobody they respect and trust has ever told them any different,

I used to be one of these kinds of people, when I was in my 20s and 30s. I had a family of 5 kids, three from another marriage, and 2 of my own. On a fundraiser's salary with the Salvation Army it was devilishly hard to make ends meet. It was even harder to think of possibly helping myself and my family "move up" to a better level of lifestyle. That was, of course, the general impulse of the time -- get a life together that was measurably better than whatever your father and mother had enjoyed.

During those years, thinking about taxes was like thinking of how to avoid a plague; I did not think of how every cent of the taxes I paid was coming back to me and my family in terms of protection, rules and regulations that provide safety and comfort, conveniences, services, or some other beneficial way. "The government" was just another complication in my life that detracted measurably from that life I was struggling to make.

Yes, I had my Civics Course in high school. But the problem with that course was that while they told us what the government was organizationally and how it worked, they didn't emphasize a most critical point: that our government is all of us together organizing a) to provide a regulatory environment that keeps us from stepping on each others' toes, and b) to provide services that we all need and use daily. I just never "got it" for a long time. It wasn't until I got a lot closer to municipal government through a Michigan Municipal League project I was involved in that I finally began to see things in a different light.

So I'm thinking that what we need to do is embark not so much on a propaganda campaign relative to taxes or relative to specific issues that force us to raise taxes for programs we desperately need to function, but on educating people, helping folks out there throughout our state and nation, who don't have anything in the way of an education, to learn how THEY ARE the local government and the state government and the federal government. We need a method of helping them, as adults, now out of school, to identify themselves as part of a community, like they can feel part of a church group, or a community group, or even the gang of guys at the local bar.

It's not that most people don't have some sort of community roots, it's that they somehow have missed the message that they ARE their government and that whatever is their fair share needs to be paid in order for them to live as decently as we all do in this country. And that there are both protections and advantages as well as responsibilities in this. That's probably where our lack of allowing education to have a high priority for our state has doomed us to have to maintain government in the face of such incredibly isolationist and provincial attitudes about the individual's and the community's responsibility.

I will admit that there may well be the occasional folks who just say "me first and the hell with the other guy" or who say "I'll give as little as I can so I can get more services for free than the next guy." Just your basic "free-riders." But I think this kind of intentionality and meanness about it all is pretty rare.

So maybe what we need to do is produce a video that does a persuasive and compelling bit of this educating; something that would help people identify personally with their government as a piece of themselves that they need to
take care of.

Anybody interested in that? That's the sort of thing I do pretty well. And I wouldn't mind lending a hand with this sort of effort. Though I would need some help in doing it. Then we could take such a thing and put it all over FaceBook and YouTube and MySpace etc. and link it in to Twitter and make tweets out of it, etc. And the video would tell the story in a fresh, compelling, believable way that government is us all, organizing to do what serves our needs.

One more thought, and then I'll quit: I believe we need today a careful balance between the community and the individual. Our system, which combines capitalism and democracy in very unique ways, is very much based, in this country, on a high level of advocacy for the individual's rights. And justly so, given where we came from. But it's not all a one-way deal.

We need also, however, to be protective of the community's well-being and we together need to be insisting on and educating people in their responsibility, or their need to act responsibly toward the communities in which they find themselves. Not IMPOSING it from outside, but educating and motivating people ABOUT it. So they can modify their stereotypes and their behavior and become responsibile members of the community.

Throughout history we can see instances where individuals fight their way to the top or are born at the top of the heap and rule others: (monarchy, and feudal estates right down to democracy in America with the tycoons and the poverty-stricken struggling in competition as we worked hard to evolve a middle class larger and more powerful and economically self-sufficient than both.

Then we have various instances of where the community or the nation is considered foremost. which would take us from socialism and communism, even some forms of fascism, down to democracy in Japan as it is practiced today, with a strong emphasis on the community in the midst of a democratic form of government.

But somehow I think we need to get that mix of co-responsibility back and forth between individuals and community ironed out and expressed a little more evenly.

Democracy and capitalism together is our system; sure, but it can be improved with some careful consideration for both individuals and the communities in which they find themselves. I guess I'm just an old "tax and regulate Democrat" at heart. Sure I want my rights as an individual protected, absolutely. But I am also needed as a responsible and responsive member of the community group in which I live, do business and function.

James Madison, in the Federal papers dealt with "factions" as groups of people who gathered together to exploit their own views or actions to the exclusion of, and perhaps to the detriment of, others. So our founding fathers framed a constitution that allowed us to continually re-invent ways of dealing with such people, according to the times in which we have lived.

But what the founding fathers did not address as helpfully is the way in which communities do have both a moral and a practical claim on individuals, just as individuals must work out their claims on the communities in which they live. It's a two-way street that Americans have had relatively little opportunity to practice, in my way of thinking. I believe it's a fragile balance, too. Too much emphasis on either one can complex problems; and that has happened at various junctures in our history as a nation.

I've been re-reading Richard Hofstadter's "The Era of Reform," (1870 to 1920) and it seems that this period of history presaged our own era. Populists and Progressives, working out the relationships between individuals and community, trying to wrest justice for individuals from the community. But not necessarily giving attention on the individual's responsibility back to the community as a place from whose decisions we all do benefit.

It's as if our whole history is the expression of fear that community (the municipality, the state, the nation) would take over and squash the individual -- which, of course is the anxiety from which our system was birthed, and the basis out of which we so denigrated the socialist and communist experiments of the early 20th century.

And under these regimes, "The State," (we always seem to talk in this kind of discussion of "governments" rather than seeing communities of which individuals are a part) operating as monarchies and oligarchies or in totalitarian systems, has attempted to act on behalf of the people (the community) with disastrous effect.

But have we really worked out the best way to do democracy and capitalism together? I think here's a wrinkle here that needs a further bit of ironing. Mostly it needs educating and motivation. We need to keep working on this issue of the individual and the community. Each has responsibilities to the other, some of which seem to have gone unrecognized. Each need certain rights and freedoms. It's a balance we need to strive for.