Happy Tax Day

This morning, my wife was taking the fat envelopes I'm mailing off to the federal and state revenue services today, and my daughter PJ saw them. She said, "Is that a present for me?"

I said, "No, sweetie, it's a present for the government."

We started trying to explain, in a way a 2 and 3/4 year old can understand, what taxes are. "You see, the government does a lot of things for us, and so once a year we give money to the government so they can pay for all these things. Like the streets. You know the streets we cross and walk along? And the stoplights and the flashing red hand and the walking man that you love so much? (PJ loves traffic signals. She wants them on her next birthday cake.) The government takes care of those. And..."

As we searched for another illustration, I recalled that the toll road looming largest in my life was actually now being owned and operated by a private company to which it had been given a very long-term lease, and that the tolls had increased quite a bit since then.

"And the schools that...a lot of kids go to," said my wife.

PJ isn't school-age yet, but the day looms when we will have to decide whether she will enter the Chicago Public School system or whether, like most of the middle-class parents we know, we will put her into a private elementary school. Before Obama put Arnie Duncan in charge of education in this country, he ran the Chicago Public Schools, and the results he got were, shall I say, mixed. Duncan was 'successful in engineering a situation in which a great deal of attention and money is directed to a few desirable schools while the rest are left to their own devices.

For those kids who do very well academically, there is a decent chance of testing into a good public high school. Elementary school is a different story. There are, of course, a few charter and magnet schools which are highly sought-after by parents who have the time and resources to navigate the CPS's labyrinthine ways. We visited one of them, a Montessori school a 20-minute drive from our neighborhood. We thought it was OK, not fabulous, but figured we'd put PJ in the lottery for their preschool. Got the letter from them finally. We're 64th on the waiting list.

If your kid doesn't happen to be one of the elect who makes it into one of these schools, then chances are Duncan's magic isn't going to work for her. The elementary school in our attendance area is on No Child Left Behind's Most Wanted list. It has been abandoned by all the white and/or middle-class parents in our neighborhood. Most of the people we talk to take it for granted that we would never consider sending PJ there. They all want to know whether we're sending her to the Lab School. The Lab School is where Obama sent his kids. It's also, apparently, where Arnie Duncan sent his kids. It's an astronomically expensive private school affiliated with the University of Chicago. I'm sure it's excellent. The fact that the head of the @#$! public school system sent his kids to Lab, though, does tell you something about both him and the CPS.

Some friends of ours who are also a two-mom family have told us they're thinking about sending their kids to our (failing) public elementary school. They've got four kids and they can't do private tuition for all of them; and for them as for us, Catholic school, which is a common resource for parents of somewhat more modest means who are opting out of the public system, is out of the question. ("Mommy...what does 'inherently disordered and intrinsically evil' mean?") They contacted the school to ask for a tour. The folks in the administrative office had never heard of such a thing. For most of the kids at this school, there are no other options, so there's no point in visiting the place ahead of time.

I've often thought that actually fixing the public education system would be the best stimulus package you could ever hope to create. There are thousands of urban households paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to put their kids in private school for the sole reason that they refuse to trust their kids in the public system. Some of that's racism; some of it's wanting your kid to have a good experience with school. Make the public school system one that works *for everybody*--both the kids who are 'stuck' with it and the kids whose parents could afford to go private--and in addition to ameliorating a lot of social problems, you would put millions of dollars back into other sectors of the economy.

But nobody seems to believe, in the political world, that public school can work *for everybody.* The best Duncan seems to believe anyone can do is to make a few schools work for a few people. And indeed, making the public system work *for everybody* would require radical change--the kind of change I have to say I don't hope to see in my own lifetime.

To break this depressing train of thought, I said, "So...what else does the government do for us?"

My wife said, "Well, the police...the firefighters...and the parks! They take care of the parks!"

Now we were finally talking PJ's language. We don't have a backyard. But our neighborhood does have many parks, and they are well-maintained, and PJ loves them. She meets all kinds of other kids there and we meet their parents and the result is that for the first time in our adult lives we actually feel like we are part of the place where we live. The park is where PJ learns how to do things like share, take turns, not throw sand, and so on. It's public space doing what it's supposed to do--not only giving kids who don't have their own real estate a safe place to play, but creating a community. In many of the parks PJ goes to, there are toys that have been donated or left behind for communal use--so that the park is one of the few places where you can say about an object, "That belongs to everybody."

My wife went off to work with my presents for the government. I did not tell PJ that much of that 'present' is going to pay for a war in Afghanistan and an occupation in Iraq that I had never wanted, had protested against, and had thought I was voting to end when I voted for Obama. I might have got round to telling her that the government was now going to pay for health care for more people, but by the time I was saying, "You see, PJ, in a country like ours, the way it works is..." she was off to the playroom.

The way it works is, every year you send the government money, and the government spends it on things which are supposed to benefit everyone. Sometimes it's spent well, sometimes it's spent badly. Typically there is a lot of money spent on certain things that politicians really care about and not enough money spent on things that the rest of us care about. But we give the government our money because if we didn't, there wouldn't be anything in this country that was public--from the post office to the parks. We're already losing public space and public infrastructure to privatisation--ask anyone in Chicago about what's happened to our municipal parking meters--and when that happens we lose money too, we just don't send it all off in an envelope. It gets nickeled and dimed out of us bit by bit and goes off to corporate profitland where we never see it again.

The way it works is, you pay taxes because it's the right thing to do. Because sharing is what makes civilization possible and life bearable. Because despite your personal failings and selfishness you do want everyone to have some basic things that human beings shouldn't have to be without and you are willing to pay for that even if you are not willing to mount the barricades and work for it yourself. And of course because you'll be arrested if you don't--I mean, unless you are a politician, or a large corporation with clever accountants and a big bucket of 'tax incentives.'

One reason I don't post a lot here now is that nothing is as clear-cut for me as it used to be. I'm glad for the opportunity to stop hating my government the way I hated it when it was in thrall to the vicious and greedy thugs of the Bush regime. But the war is still there. All the problems I hated before, they're mostly still there. I'm still paying for them.

Some things are getting better. It's pretty much always going to be a mixed back from now on. But I guess that beats a big ol' bag of unadulterated evil.

So, it's a beautiful day here, and off we went to the park. PJ loves the swings. They make her feel like she's flying. Tax day is a good day, all in all, out here in Plaidderland, as I continue learning to take the bad with the good.

Happy tax day,

The Plaid Adder

;-)

almost.

From the Boston Globe op-ed page:

<http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/04/12/the_true_patriotism_of_paying_taxes/>

family unit is paying only 6.2% of Adjusted Gross Income in federal taxes. That's not including SSI, Medicare taxes, etc. I think this is the lowest it's been for us in many years. Of course, our damn state sales and local taxes are out the waaa-zooo!!!

Anyway, a Democratic Congress and Democratic President got us the lowest federal tax bill we've seen in so long we can't remember.

Money used to destroy streets, parks, buildings and people in other nations.

I always love, love, love everything you write. Please do it more often if you can. I miss you around here!

:hi:

Good to see you.