Time to Pay Up

I blogged about our mammothly incomprehensible tax code last week, but as Monday was tax day, and as offshore tax havens have been all the rage lately, I decided one more post on taxes was appropriate.

It's well documented that most Americans think the tax code is unfair if they even understand it at all. The tax code itself is well documented, consisting of some 73,000 pages of who-knows-what. Just check out the IRS's website and see if the word intuitive isn't the furthest thing from your mind. So rather than launching into another tirade against why this whole thing is so complicated, I'd rather spend some time reflecting on the value of taxes - pun somewhat intended.

Politically speaking, taxes are anathema to success. One generally doesn't become popular by asking people for more of their money. Republicans in particular have taken the value of low tax rates to nationally suicidal extremes, but they have profited politically so they keep pushing the limits of taxation to the extreme, and it resonates as long as we think of taxes only in terms of what is good for us. Would I like to keep more of my money? Of course! And I should keep most of my money. After all, I worked hard to earn it, and I can put it to good use.

But without my hard-earned money, the government can't do anything. Some people would say this is a good thing, but I argue that those people live in a fantasy world. The government is inefficient, politicians can be corrupt, and certainly there is need for streamlining and reform, but the government is an important driver of economic growth as well as the protector of the freedoms we hold so dear. The government's money is our money, a fact that is not lost on Americans, but which we seem to quibble with too frequently. It's easy to attack government spending in the abstract - and it's actually not very hard to find areas where we should curb spending - but many people struggle to identify where they would actually ask the government to cut back, an indication that much of government spending isn't as wasteful as it is often made out to be. In fact, all of us benefit greatly from government spending.

Even Republican worship at the altar of the Pentagon is tacit acknowledgement of the good of government spending. In fact, in the recent sequester debacle, moderate Republicans lamented the cuts to military spending both out of fidelity to the Armed Forces and because cuts in military spending would lead to job losses...imagine that...The government keeps us safe, but they also spend money that leads to private sector job growth, and not just on the military.

I would also argue, that taxes contribute at least somewhat to national unity, something that we clearly need more of, as it shouldn't take tragedies like the bombing of a marathon to unite us. If everyone chips in a little bit, we all have a stake in our society. Far from the cries of class warfare that we hear from both the left and the right, the idea that everyone pitches in what he or she can should remind us that we are in this together. That what hampers those who need most drags us all down, and that what has benefited those who have most is a product of our combined efforts to build a better society.

So it's time to pay up, and though I can only get so excited about tax day - in fact I'm not excited about it at all - I do hope that we can use today to remember the good that public expenditures can bring and to become so frustrated with the process of giving Uncle Sam our money that we force our elected officials to do something to make the process easier and more equitable.