A Parable of the Taxpayer and the Commons

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:



A Parable of the Taxpayer and the Commons
On the invisible canopy of support for our everyday lives.

By Chuck Collins


This time of year it is useful to recount the parable of the taxpayer and the member of Congress. Tip O’Neill, the colorful congressman from Massachusetts who said “all politics is local,” used to recount a version of this.

The taxpayer woke up one winter morning feeling angry about his taxes. He decided to travel to Washington to complain directly to his Congressional representative.

He turned on the radio to listen the weather report, provided by the National Weather Service. He heard the city snowplow go by, clearing his street. He made a cup of coffee with clean water.

He cooked up some eggs and bacon for his family, food products that were certified by the meat inspectors at US Department of Agriculture. It never crossed his mind the possibility that his family might be poisoned.

He kissed his children goodbye as they waited for the school bus to take them to the local public elementary school and high school. His oldest daughter hoped to attend college and was applying for financial aid loans and grants, like the ones he received a generation earlier. On his walk to the subway, he dropped her application letters in the US Post Office mailbox.

He passed the senior housing community where his dear mother lived. He didn’t worry for a second about his mother, who had quality health care paid for by Medicare, a monthly Social Security check and a secure, friendly and affordable community to live in. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2707

[MisterP]

1. alas, this will have no impact on the libertarians, since their belief that private corporations or

vigilante "citizen militias" can do all this better and cheaper, because they're private and face competition, and that taxes are theft. the real-world results of such neoliberalism--e.g., that business is for money, not service or fulfulling a goal, and this gets truer the bigger the business--passes them by completely. furthermore, a state restricting itself to patching "market failures" is gonna shed services as soon as some expert deems the GNP sufficient to let everyone buy their own services (at 3x the price, of course).

[midnight]

2. My mother will not live in a nursing home, because we are a family of nurses,

and we see that the govt. cannot or will not supply adequate funding to assure that my mother will receive the proper care via adequate staffing. There are other variables that shift depending on what slice of medicare is carved up and for whom the Elite feel are receiving too many handouts. For those who read these blogs, know that the nurses who protest the harmful care being doled out are being arrested. Only a few have the resources to fight this fight. We are a family who watch our Danish relatives live in Govt. sponsored retirement with much envy. The Danish don't spent over half their taxes on a military though. My lucky Danish relatives live with a greater sense of freedom and peace and spend far less on war. My American relatives work hard to secure safety in the health care world that few have to think about for the sure fact that they make it seem as transparent as those fish swimming in the water, but believe me it is not easy, and the funding is not there...

Please don't be lulled into thinking that our tax dollars are funneled into all those agencies you are told they are.