Democracy Taxed
Nobody prefers paying taxes…with the possible exception of IRS employees who realize that their tax returns along with those of others keep them employed.
Hardly anyone enjoys coughing up hard-earned money to “the government.”
Everyone likes to rail about taxes especially today, “Tax Day,” April 15.
But taxes are the necessary price for a civil society.
Fire and police protection. Food inspectors. Air traffic controllers. Libraries. Unemployment insurance. Water and sewer systems. Border protection. Medical care for senior citizens. Courts. Public parks and open spaces. Educational, nutritional, and medical programs for pre-school age children. Boards of elections. Enforcement of clean air and water laws.
These and hundreds of other social, economic and political functions are the glue that bond people and their/our institutions together to forge community. Humans are social beings. We need social networks — both informal and formal.
Governments are one type of formal network that at their best reflect the will of their inhabitants through their constitutions, rules, laws, policies and programs. Taxes provide the funds that allow governments to create and maintain these functions.
Are all taxes fair? No. Are tax dollars wasted? Absolutely. Can other formal networks besides governments sometimes perform the same social function without tax dollars. Sure.
This doesn’t mean we don’t need taxes.
At their best, governments are us. We need public structures and institutions that create, maintain, protect, and defend the commons and collective goals. We also need governments to control and define the other major organized structure and institution in our societies that threaten self-governance — the major one being business corporations.
As problematic as governments may be in representing its citizens, they are bastions of self-governance compared to business corporations. Business corporations are in not democratic. Employees have no Bill of Rights protections. Business corporations are not loyal to any people or place. Business corporations, in fact, seek to supplant the role of government not just economically but politically. That’s what drives privatization of public assets and institutions.
Several dozen “Tax Day Tea Parties” are taking place today across Ohio — as part of a nationwide revolt against taxes. They’re billed as nonpartisan. Many I’ve read about are focused on opposing President Obama’s stimulus programs. Whether deliberate or not, the tenor of these brewing tax revolt actions, however, seems to be much more — to reduce the power, authority, and wherewithal of government to:
1. Define and control corporate actions
2. Ensure that governments can’t assume new authorities that may be better in the public rather than the corporate domain — i.e. controlling the issuance of national currency, and/or
3. Decrease the ability of government to meet basic public functions, thereby, opening the door to selling or leasing them to for-profit business corporations.
There’s no question we need a tax revolt. The proposed fiscal year federal budget calls for over $700 billion for military spending (to maintain a military empire with bases and troops in more than 100 nations, including current wars and occupations in several) and $750 billion more to bailout banks that lost trillions in risky and bizarre financial gambles. An increasing amount of our tax dollars are in the form of corporate welfare. None of this increases housing security, health care security, environmental security, job security (expect for bankers and military contractors), or education security. It’s not taxes that are revolting but how and where they’re spent.
Reducing taxes for any of the three reasons above simply taxes democracy by decreasing the ability of governments to set and enforce laws, rules, priorities and programs that reflect the wishes and interests of the vast majority of the public — and against those running national and transnational business corporations.
In a time when the “free market” and Wall Street has demonstrated beyond doubt its lack of service to the public interest and lack of public accountability, government provides the best institutional path to authentic public accountability and responsibility.
Tax Day Tea Parties only brews blanket hostility at the government and represents an effort to divert popular anger away from where it most needs to be — against the growing power and rights of business corporations and toward creating a government ruled by people.
- Posted by Greg Coleridge, The American Friends Service Committee and the Program On Corporations, Law & Democracy
on April 16th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
(A comment sent in from a friend and supporter of USTV Media worth sharing…)
I was initially enthralled with the tea party idea, but that cooled off a few months ago. The Fair Tax is a much more appealing and rational approach to me. If implemented properly, it could drastically alter the government-corporation link and influence. To accept the concept you have to be willing to admit that government doesn’t create wealth; the people it represents do.
The federal government is a bloated system that breaks down during system model analysis. When it comes to functional systems — whether they’re made up of hardware, software, or people — it turns out that smaller, self-managed sub-systems with decentralized control are much more effective. Sorry to be a wet blanket on the Federal government’s parade, but bigger is not better. Obama will need to violate several laws of physics to *successfully* accomplish everything he’s spooling the government up to do.
I do take issue with a sentence in this article, towards the bottom:
Really? Maybe in some nostalgic, wistful remembrance of the past, but certainly not the present. Public accountability doesn’t work very well when the fox is guarding the hen house — particularly when the fox keeps tossing treats to the watchdog to keep him distracted. The solution to eliminating the fox is to starve him out.
I’ll toss and turn at night as long as we have Barney Frank and other partisan hacks (from either party) lobbing hand grenades and deflecting accountability while disguising themselves as beacons of reform.
By the way, have you seen this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pk–Ox49L0
A student questioning Barney Frank during a Q&A at Harvard, with Frank going into his typical debate misdirection patter.
on April 17th, 2009 at 10:16 am
In response to my friend’s comments, I have heard a lot of back and forth in regards to the advantages or disadvantages regarding what is often referred to as the “Fair Tax.” Gauging what is a “fair tax” I would think would be something best determined through democratic discourse (something which we unfortunately do not have enough of). What I definitely don’t agree with is going with a straight sales tax, which places an unequal burden on those with lesser means, who are then de facto paying greater percentages of their proportional wealth than are the financially well off.
However, perhaps we should go to a straight sales tax on some things. Perhaps the military budget, or at least all funding for military operations in Iraq, should be paid for completely out of gasoline sales taxes. It would provide for a truer direct economic cost for the product, rather than hiding the cost behind the socializing of those costs through corporate subsidies for oil companies (which using expropriated wealth through taxation in order to help private oil corporations gain access to a raw material arguably does).
As for this…
I have to say I still fully concur with that statement. What private consortium would or could better serve the public needs and the commons? What private entity is going to handle such tasks and be accountable and responsible for public decision making than a public body? The converse of that is exactly why we are where we are at today. Government has become a fiefdom of private power, and ‘investors’ purchase it and it’s role in society as a commodity to fulfill their own needs and gratifications in order to give a good return on their investments.
I propose caution in regards to conflating the principle and purpose of government with the rather sorry and co-opted version we have today. Greg Coleridge, and many who are aligned with his perspective, have no love or affinity for what and how our current government is functioning and who is actually making the decisions for it, who it is truly beholden to (just look at who is running the US Treasury today and setting economic policy to denote that sad reality).
The real deficit we have in this nation is not so much one of an economic nature in the ‘markets’ as much as it is one of a democratic nature in governance.
on April 19th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Here are some interesting comments submitted in regards to the posting by Greg Coleridge….
In regards to this analysis, I’d have to say there is effectively only one real political party in the U.S., and that is the Business Party. We do not have political contributors, we have political investors. And like all business and market transactions, they are looking for a return on that investment.
Even with as much damage as the economic deficit that we are experiencing is (and it is serious), the really important deficit we have is a democratic deficit, a lack of governing accountability. The key point to this is not so much that ‘government’ per se is the problem, and so diminishment of government is the solution, as much as it is diminishment of democratic accountability to governance is the source of the problem, and the main reason for the criminal levels of inefficiency and corruption (like it is in all governments around the world that experience these conditions, often of a much worse nature). The idea that government is inefficient is not taking into account that is is actually very efficient and effective for those who are its real investors and owners, who reap the ample returns for the influence that they buy and policies that they invest in which assure their own economic interests at the expense of the commons.
Our government has become the very thing the American Revolution was fought about, that being a rebellion against the idea “that government is a tool to confer privilege on insiders”. That is the key. And the legal basis, the structure of law and the legality of allowing money and property trump people’s rights is the genetic code in the legal ‘flaw’ that has been instrumentally important in bringing us to this point.
And the consistent reference to the ‘they’ that the aforementioned comments refer to as in regards to opposition to the Bush/DeLay syndicates as opposed to the corporate racket that buys our government through Pelosi and crew, etc… is of little relevant significance. The GOP seems to have their ranks filled with apologists for war crimes and scores of criminal violations of human rights and have proven to be radicals of the most dangerous of orders in challenging constitutional law as we know it. This as opposed to the institutionalists that populate the Democratic party that disliked the Bush policies because they were upsetting the corporate global game more than anything else, and they want to go back to that, not go forward to any kind of truly democratic state (one in which economic issues are also on the democratic agenda and the menu for democratic decision making. Right now, those discussions are not allowed in what is considered the acceptable parameters of debate in our oh so hallowed halls of discourse, most particularly in our corporatized mass media system).
Also, one other point to keep in mind, there really is no such thing as a ‘free market’. The market is a tool, a mechanism to provide a process within society which has its various rules and guidelines. Or at least it should. And those rules must transcend ‘market forces’, and must be agreeable and accountable to forces not dictated or designed by ‘the market.’ For if the rules of the market are directly liable to ‘the market’, then they are commodities of the market to be bought and sold and owned. Which is pretty much why we have the problem with ‘government’ today, as it is simply a mechanism to be invested in, to be purchased, and so the players make the rules to benefit them. “Money is speech”, legislation and access to it is ‘lobbied’, etc…
Government isn’t the problem. Governance is an absolute essential function in providing the mechanism of a democratic society. Government which is a commodity to be purchased through market forces as opposed to democratic accountability is the problem. And ‘market fundamentalists’ and decades of ideological devotion to ‘the magic of the market’ and ‘market transcendence’ is what has brought us to where we are today. Wall Street owns government. They write the rules. And now we pay the costs.