on the big iraq candy mountain
by Max Clark
Published: January 29, 2008
Sometimes, as I look at the night sky, listening to the presidential debates on You Tube or the news on those endless cable streams, I wonder if I’m all alone out there.
I belong to a certain philosophy that seems strange to many, stupid to more and un-American to most:
I want someone to raise my taxes.
Now, I understand that I live in a country that was founded by men who caffeinated Boston Harbor on the principle of not paying taxes, but I think that we’ve really lost sight of a very basic principle. Taxes pay for things we use.
I should give this some context. Some time before the new economic stimulus plan was announced, I was watching the South Carolina Republican Debate on Fox News. A commercial aired for Rudy Guiliani, in which he spoke of his plan to help the economy with a two-trillion dollar tax cut. A trillion, for those who have forgotten, is a thousand billions. In case you have a problem envisioning such a preposterous number, I’ll put it in terms of a measurable commodity: Tootsie Rolls.
Fair market value for a Tootsie Roll is a little under 2 cents, assuming you don’t get a discount for buying in bulk (a superficial search online found that if I were to buy 144 400-roll bags, the sweets would only be 1.5 cents each). Now, instead of giving his tax cut, Rudy Guiliani could recommend the United States government buy 100 trillion pieces of the candy. They are about an inch long and half of that in diameter, and combined would form a line 1.5 billion miles long or, conservatively, a cube 6 miles in every direction.
If we converted our military spending into that candy, we could easily cover small nations in several layers of chocolate. Most of Iraq’s provinces could be covered in a sea of chewy cocoa so impenetrable, that it would probably violate the Geneva Convention. But back to taxes…
This week Congress is gearing up to pass a package worth hundreds of billions in rebate checks for taxpayers and the Administration has one clear message of how to spend it: blow it on something you don’t need. This is our economic policy. Instead of improving our roads and our schools, buy that XBOX 360 (But please, do not buy a Playstation 3 or a Wii). This really points to a key problem I have with tax cuts in general: Americans are not good with money.
I say this as a generalization and I do not mean to offend you, my dear, fiscally responsible reader, but on average, people in this country have over $10,000 in debts. Our citizens are capable of blowing money on stuff they don’t need, even without the government’s encouragement. We’re a country of electronic toilet seat warmers and laser-powered toothbrush sterilizers. Consumerism is our shtick.
Remember that line of Tootsie Rolls, long enough to go to the sun and back 10 times? Well, quadruple that and you still don’t have what America owes the world. The interest alone costs about as much as our military.
But here we take billions, ungodly billions of dollars and instead of building our infrastructure, instead of financial training programs, instead of creating jobs, we’re just giving it away so that every American can buy gasoline (not from BP, though) and new pants (not the ones made from China) or a new television (not from… well, you don’t really need a new TV anyway). Are you seeing where this plan may backfire on us? Nowadays, reinvestment doesn’t really heal us as much as it did, even blowing it all on a new computer won’t solve all our problems.
And, really, I don’t want a computer. I want firemen. I want schools. I like schools and firemen. I don’t mind if my tax dollars mean that people become educated and cities are not gutted by uncontrolled infernos. Is the principle of paying taxes so offensive as to outweigh the practicality of it?
There is an argument that we don’t need more taxes, if we cut spending. Something President Bush is going to come out for in his State of the Union address tonight. The theory is that that by cutting frivolous programs, money will be freed up to handle the costs of new initiatives. Unfortunately, cutting frivolous programs is hard to do but proposing tax cuts is easy. Those two facts make funding new initiatives an unlikely prospect. We’re working with a zero-sum economic policy and that’s not really getting us anywhere.
It’s not that our leaders don’t know better. The men we elect to office are very often intelligent people, with high degrees in relevant programs and who consult experts in economics. Most are even millionaires themselves, which Mitt Romney has informed me is key in understanding how to help the lower and middle classes. The only problem is that if our leaders eliminated earmarking, if they raised taxes enough to provide for cleaner air and better schools instead of funding pork and cutting taxes, they would not get elected.
So, though I’m not going to burn the $600 check I will be receiving in a few months in some weary protest against a mentality that’s weighing us down, I do encourage those who do receive it to consider where it’s going and where it came from. You might not need that new car (and if you do, remember that, counter-intuitively, Toyota actually has a better employment record in the US than GM does).
But if you’re of a mind like mine and wish to make a statement that rubs against the grain, we can each take five dollars of our $600 rebate, assuming about half of all Americans will be receiving one, and still make a line of Tootsie Rolls that would circle the earth over 23 times. But don’t buy them just yet, I have no idea where those little things are made.
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