Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, August 1, 2018. Posted Thursday morning, August 5.
“CUT TAXES NOT DEALS”: Screen shot of Alternet tweet linking to an article with the headline Here’s Why Americans Hate Big Government---Even When They Benefit From It. Image is an undated and uncredited photo of a Tea Party rally.
Headline on this Salon interview with political scientist Suzanne Mettler by Paul Rosenberg, reposted at Alternet, is “Here's Why Americans Hate Big Government — Even When They Benefit From It”. Of course headlines exaggerate and the interview doesn’t come close to fully explaining why Americans hate big government etc. but Mettler makes a good stab at it in her answers to Rosenberg’s questions. You should read the whole thing but this bit about benefits in the form of tax credits and deductions struck me hardest on my first go through…
[It] illustrates that wider pattern I was finding. It's interesting because most policies in the tax code are for high-income people. They’re submerged, people use them but they don't think government has done anything for them. I wondered, would that be different for these low-income people who are EITC beneficiaries? But it's the same basic pattern. I think a general pattern of these policies and tax codes is that people view it not as government giving them a benefit, but rather them getting to keep more of their own money,
But that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s a benefit if you accept that the government has a claim on whatever percentage of your income it deems necessary for its purposes, even up to 100 percent. The object is not for the government to pay people’s way but to make it a little easier for some people to pay their own way and to make sure everybody who can afford to (now including now those who are benefiting from the tax credits) use their money to buy certain things the government thinks it’s in the general interest to have bought, a middle class lifestyle that supports raising a family being number one, and that means helping people buy houses in safe and wholesome neighborhoods, decent schooling for their children, and medical care, while leaving them enough extra money to buy whatever else they need to get through the week: milk and groceries, a car, gas for the car, decent clothes to wear to work and school, and the occasional movie and dinner out and maybe a vacation and trip to Disneyland, because man, woman, and child don’t live by bread alone and the economy suffers if restaurants and theme parks don’t do a good business.
The government is interested in stimulating the housing industry and putting architects, contractors, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and realtors to work. It’s interested in promoting an educated and healthy citizenry and a skilled and flexible workforce. It doesn’t offer these benefits to you and me for our sake. It does things that benefit all of us as an us for all of our sake.
Tax deductions and subsidies in the form of tax deductions aren’t individual benefits. People do benefit from them---in the same way they benefit from manufacturers’ coupons at the grocery store. That’s how they work, as discounts and rebates. At the grocery store, you get to keep a little of your money, money you were going to spend, in the hope you will like the discounted product and buy it again and that you will spend the money you saved at the store on something else either on that trip or when you return to that store another day with another coupon. But you still pay for your groceries.
So you can call it a benefit and see it as a benefit but most people aren’t going to feel it as a benefit. What they’re going to feel is that they’re still paying taxes and still paying for the goods and services the deductions are helping them pay for but which are still expensive and taking a big bite out of their paychecks. While waiting for their increased refunds, the mortgage has to be paid, the kids’ tuition has to be paid, the doctor has to be paid, and it has to come out of your own pocket. And surprisingly “Wait until I get my refund” doesn’t hold most creditors off. Even if people can make themselves see these benefits as benefits, they’re going to see them as not benefiting them enough and not soon enough. They need the money now.
And then much of their money the government takes goes for things they don’t want or see the need for or see themselves benefiting from, including and especially the government’s keeping itself running---that is towards maintaining the bureaucracy. Most people experience this public good and necessary expense in the form of less than friendly and understanding people manning counters, windows, desks, and phones with the sole purpose of making as difficult as possible for you to get the “benefits” you supposedly paid for with your taxes.
Tax credits and write-offs become benefits when they make it so you don’t pay any income tax. (Everybody pays some taxes, if only sales taxes. They pay taxes every time they go to the store. So let’s not hear any more about the poor not paying taxes.) And that only happens when you owe very little in taxes which means you made very little money in the last year, and who wants to be in that boat, or when you can write off significant expenditures and charitable deductions and business losses and “business” expenses and even certain forms of income, and you know who gets to do that. And you know who doesn’t want to share the benefits of living here with the rest of us.
The rich want to keep all their money and do their best to see that the government lets them. And they don’t want us to have any benefits because then we aren’t dependent on the shitty jobs with meager wages and no benefits they want us to take and do without complaint to make them richer. And through their lobbyists and bought and paid for politicians, who I’m disgusted to say include many Democrats, they write the tax codes and they don’t write them to benefit us, either us as individuals or us an us.
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To read the whole of Rosenberg’s interview with Mettler follow the link to Why Americans Hate Big Government---Even When They Benefit From It at Alternet.
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