Taxpayers Should Be Put First
Barney Frank once famously said, "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." There are a lot of things you could say about that quote, but the first one that comes to mind for me is who is this “we” exactly? Because “we” could refer to all the people in the United States, but that’s really not true. Not only are there foreigners and illegal aliens here, but there are also many people who only take from their fellow citizens and never give anything.
There are people who spend their whole lives on the dole in one form or another. They milk every welfare program there is, they make their money illegally or they just don’t work at all. In a meaningful sense, they shouldn’t be considered part of “we.” They’re the people that live off of the real “we,” which is the people that pay taxes.
Many of us, me included, do not pay taxes voluntarily.
Why?
Well, what if you decided to rent a car and you paid for a premium, high-dollar ride? In fact, you’re expecting to see a new Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini or Bugatti wheeled out for you to drive around this week. Instead, a 1987 Chevrolet Chevette is brought out. The paint is flaking. One of the rear-view mirrors is falling off. There’s an empty McDonald’s bag and a bloody band-aid sitting in the passenger seat and you can’t believe you paid money for this. Like any money at all! Then, you say you want a different car, and they laugh in your face and tell you that you’re going to be ARRESTED AND PUT IN JAIL if you don’t keep paying money to rent this one.
This is the experience taxpayers have in America. When we go to a mechanic, a restaurant, or buy a new TV, we expect value for our money. We should expect the same from the government, but we never get it.
Now you might say, “There’s no way a nation of 330 million people is going to agree on every policy. No matter who you are, your tax dollars are going to be spent on SOMETHING you don’t agree with.”
While that’s absolutely true, in a Republic, that should be the exception, not the rule because if government really is the name we give to things we choose to do together, as one of the people who pays the bills, I should have a big say about what those things happen to be. If there are wild disagreements about a huge number of things, it’s almost certainly because the government has gotten involved in far too many things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
As a way of calling for (what else) higher taxes on the rich, Elizabeth Warren once said:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Note that when she’s trying to sell the government to people, she isn’t selling studies that test the impact of giving cocaine to monkeys, sending money to foreign governments, or paying NGOs to help sneak illegal aliens into the country, she’s promoting the sort of things that even 90% of small government conservatives would consider to be part of the things “we” “choose to do together.” She’s talking about roads, putting money into education, police forces, firefighters, and the military.
If our government stuck to basics like that, those of us who do pay taxes wouldn’t have much to complain about.
However instead, our government, both federal and local, has gotten so involved in so many things that the people who actually pay the bills have started to come last in many cases. Don’t those of us who pay the bills deserve more than a little DEFERENCE from the government that is supposed to work for us? Don’t we deserve a little value for our money? Inarguably, that’s not happening.
But it’s worse than that.
Increasingly, taxpayers are being treated as second-class citizens compared to the homeless, illegals, criminals, lazy bums, and weirdos.
There are endless examples of this that all of us could note at this point:
Instead of taking away benches that would make life easier for taxpayers, why couldn’t they just leave the benches in place and shoo away the homeless?
Similarly. why would you take taxpayer money and use it to pay illegal aliens to be here? Even if you did do that, which is an outrage, why would you pay them more than veterans who served our country?
Here’s a question; Why should taxpayers have to walk through tent cities full of junkies and bums on the streets their taxes paid for?
It’s also worth noting that the Daniel Penny case in New York has gotten a lot of attention:
Penny is a former Marine who restrained Jordan Neely, a drugged-up, mentally ill career criminal who was threatening all the people in a subway car. You hear many people, me included, speaking up loudly for Penny, but not as many asking why someone like Neely wasn’t in prison in the first place. Neely had 42 arrests, some of them extremely violent, at only 30 years old. This was a man who randomly attacked a 67-year-old woman and fractured her orbital bone in 2021. Neely should have been in prison until he was old and gray or died there, not on a subway threatening people and putting someone like Daniel Penny in a position where he had to make decisions about whether to risk his life protecting his fellow passengers or not. Jordan Neely was not a victim, the taxpayers in New York were the ones victimized by a justice system that failed to take even the most basic steps to ensure their safety.
What it all boils down to is that yes, we may “choose” to try to help the poor, junkies, or the homeless “together,” just as we may decide to try to rehabilitate criminals, but the wants of those people should NEVER be put ahead of the taxpayers paying for it. As the old saying goes, “he who pays the piper, calls the tune.”
Some people have come to think that it’s the government paying for these things, but that’s exactly backward. It’s the taxpayers, the contributing members of society, who are paying the bills and who are the ones the government was formed to serve in the first place. That’s something an awful lot of people in our government at every level seem to have forgotten and also one of the reasons it was so healthy that they were rebuked by many of those same taxpayers in the last election.
This is exactly why I have never, and will never as long as I live, vote anything but a firm “NO” to any and all requests for a tax increase of any kind whatsoever. If decades of life experience have taught me nothing else, it’s this: 1) most taxes go to things which directly benefit me not one iota, 2) the vast majority of time that I vote no, there will be enough gullible taxpayers who out of guilt if not personal selfishness will vote yes and ram the increase down my throat anyway, and most importantly 3) when push comes to shove, the funds will ALWAYS be found to cover the essentials. You can bet that when the garbage isn’t getting picked up, enough people will raise enough of a stink that wasteful government officials will manage to find a frill to cut elsewhere so as to cover what really matters. I have never, ever been personally inconvenienced for long - if ever - by the failure, albeit far too rare, of a tax increase request.
"Some people have come to think that it’s the government paying for these things, but that’s exactly backward." Exactly! And let's not forget that each time the "government" prints more money, they're adding to the debt being placed on the shoulders of our children and grandchildren for decades to come.