Reply #3: Paying taxes is patriotic [View All]

Unless you don't feel like you should pay for what you get. Rich folks should be happy to pay quite a bit more, both in amount of dollars and percentage for a system that has made them wealthy and that protects that wealth. Quite a lot of those individual fortunes were made because the United States (at least used to) have a good public education system, a good interstate highway system, a good interlocking system of transportation and commerce. How many blocks of sewer line are laid by Wall Street on a given day? Worker productivity has gone steadily up in the last 50 years, and people are working better, more efficiently and longer hours. Yet wages are stagnant. Where is the wealth created by that labor going? We used to tax corporations and wealthy persons at 90% in the 1950s and 1960s, and a greater percentage of Americans belonged to unions in those days. Nowadays, households have to work a minimum of two jobs, and when President Bush met a woman scraping by working three jobs, he smirked that this was the quintessential American Dream story: Working one's ass off and falling a little farther behind each and every day.

Taxes lay the foundation for the structure of our system, and the idea that taxes are a drain has been propagated by the very same persons who brought us the Great Depression of the 1930s, the savings and loan ruination of the 1980s, the junk bond disaster of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent meltdown of the housing market.