IT IS OUR MONEY!

In 2007, I paid about 22 of my income to the Federal Government and the State of Georgia in income taxes. On every dollar I spent doing my part in the consumer economy, there was another six or seven percent added for sales tax. I threw several thousand more dollars at the county where I lived in property taxes. Round figures - thirty percent of the money I earned in 2007 was handed over to various governments in taxes.

I’m not particularly upset at the idea that so much of my money was siphoned away. I would have pissed away most of it on other stuff I didn’t really need anyway, so I’m fine with the idea that I bought some decent neighborhood schools, police and fire protection, bridges that don’t collapse regularly, highways that have reduced the trip to visit loved ones to hours instead of days, and planes, tanks and missiles for our nation’s defense, to name a few things. Taxes are the price of citizenship, someone once said (or at least has now).

And I’m not particularly incensed about most of what the governments spend my money on. Some of the choices wouldn’t be mine, but they are largely arrived at through the democratic process and if I don’t like the choices, I need to elect better representatives. And on the whole, the money I give to governments seems to be used for good more than evil.

Therefore, I think the very least that the government can do in spending all of our tax money is to remember that IT IS OUR MONEY! The money wasn’t magically spun by Rumplestiltskin. It was taken from us, not ever entirely willingly, in order to do things that we cannot do individually. It does not, upon hitting the door of the US Treasury, become anything else - it is still our money.

And so this will be a common theme here at the Middle Ground. We can fight about the wisdom of how the government spends our money, but I think we can all agree that it is our money and we ought to require that government act like they know that. Condemnation is the only response to wasteful spending.

If enough of us condemn fiscal stupidity loudly enough, perhaps we can get the people who actually spend the money to remember that it is our money in the first place. THAT would be change I can believe in.