Can we all agree that we need and enjoy public services?
The roads that I drove to work on; the police and fire departments that help when I’m in trouble; the water, electricity, and garbage collection that make it possible for me to live.
There can be some disagreement about some public services; education, medical care, national defense. Perhaps some of those functions could be privately funded, but honestly, there are always going to be people who can’t afford to send their kids to private school, and those same people are probably working at jobs where their employers aren’t providing medical insurance. So there needs to be at least some public funding for education and health care.
National defense feels tricky, but it’s less tricky than you think. There is not a country on earth (nor a terrorist organization) that really feels that they have a fighting chance waging a land war in the US. We’re defended by two oceans, and the second amendment ensures that we’re all armed to the teeth. There’s really no need to maintain fleets of tanks, aircraft carriers, and long-range bombers. The mere threat of our nuclear arsenal keeps any major war between nations off the table, and intifada only gets you so far when Walmart sells AR-15s.
So. Where are we? We like public services. You don’t want to have the 911 dispatcher ask you for a credit card number before they send a fire engine. You don’t want Microsoft to be responsible for maintaining I-405. And you don’t want a utility company deciding “well, there aren’t really enough customers in that town, I think we’ll have to cut their water off, to appease the shareholders”.
Public services are paid for by the government (federal, state, and local). Governments get their revenue from taxes. Taxes are the public’s way of ensuring that their shared services remain in good order.
Does the government need to be larger than “just big enough” to sustain a useful level of roads, utilities, education, health care, and national defense? No, not really. However, if that’s all that government did, then there would be a whole bunch of stuff that Americans would have to learn to live without. Like national parks, foreign wars, and a bunch of scientific and technological research, for a start.
We’re the richest country in the world. We (privately!) spend more on lawn care than the GDP of all but the richest 20 countries. Shouldn’t we be able to do the basics and also maintain a nice place to live? I jokingly talk about “paving the planet”, especially during allergy season. But if we the people decided that government needed to stop funding everything but the basics, that’s pretty much what would happen. Corporations, beholden only to shareholders whose votes count for nothing (because the leadership of any company owns over 50% of the company, if they’re smart), don’t care about pretty scenery or photos of distant galaxies. Those things don’t pad the bottom line.
So the government has a lot of stuff to pay for. And, at a time when the tax base is 10% smaller than normal, the government decided to pay for a pair of expensive overseas wars. So, the budget surpluses that we enjoyed in the late 1990s are replaced by a bunch more deficit (and, thus, a bunch more debt).
The answer is not to cut taxes further. The answer is not necessarily to raise taxes, either. The answer will have to come from both sides. Some people are paying not enough taxes to fund their share of the public services we all enjoy. Some public services are too expensive to maintain at the levels they are maintained at today. And with the baby boomers retiring, a large amount of the American workforce (read: tax base) is disappearing, and the load on public services (like health care for retired people, for instance) is rising. So the public services will become more expensive (at least the ones that have to do with health care), and the tax base is even smaller.
We need to generate more taxes.
We need to cut public spending.
At the same time.
The people earning $250k that I know are not “small business owners”. They are corporate executives. Taxing them personally will not cause the corporations they work for to stop hiring people. Stop making sound bites, and start making changes.
My roads depend on it.