Living With the Tax "Reform"

A year or two ago, I visited my cousin in Belize, and was impressed by the ferry, mostly hand powered, that got us across the rivers near her home. Simple and effective, if not fast. No doubt cheap to both set up and to run. Was it tax or privately supported? No idea and had no reason at the time to ask. But…

Nobody likes to pay tax. Just like employers don’t like to pay wages, and homemakers don’t like to pay the grocery bill and young people don’t like to pay for music or movies. We all know we have to pay, but we want to pay as little as possible, right?

Taxes are one of the more complicated expenses we have to deal with, and how you come down on them depends on how you see yourself and your community… and your government. The recent “reform” of the federal tax system gives one cause to think about one’s view of the federal government.

If you see yourself as part of a national community, and your government as a sort of operations manager for that community, you may grouse about taxes and how they’re spent (military vs. foreign aid, developing fossil fuel or developing alternative energy, etc.) but you don’t have a problem with paying your share to keep the enterprise going.

Ferry, New River, Belize

If you see yourself as self-made and independent, and government as a limited objective adjunct, like an on-call expert for specific circumstances in a community that otherwise ought to be unrestricted, then there’s minimal reason for paying taxes. Gotta keep a standing army for defense, but no need to support education or take care of old folks. Local government can do that, right? In fact, parents can provide education and children can take care of their parents.

Of course, nice as it may be to imagine that Norman Rockwell, small town vibe, returning to it may have some consequences that are a bit less appealing than your kid learning the value of a dollar by having a paper route. (For one thing, even were we to end up pretty much an undeveloped country, it’s unlikely there are enough actual newspaper subscriptions to hire kids to deliver them. Although, with net neutrality gone, who knows? Maybe the physical newspaper would make a come back and kids can carry them door to door. But I digress.)

Government agencies are designed to implement what are primarily legislative rules. It’s impossible for Congress to pass a comprehensive law like a tax code, a commercial code, or an environmental protection law, that includes all the nuts and bolts necessary for the people on the ground to implement and enforce it. We’ve been largely fortunate in the U.S., despite the hysteria from those who just don’t think government should function as an arbiter or regulator, to have had a generally honest, very hard-working bureaucracy of professionals who perform these duties.

Taxes pay for their performance. If you have questions about whether we need these professionals, just look at our new tax bill. No one had read through it completely when it was passed, and even if they had, they couldn’t have analyzed every section. Now the IRS will have to both implement and enforce it.  Before it’s even gone into effect—which it’s doing in a frightfully short time, given its complexities—the IRS professionals are having to issue cautions about probable interpretations concerning questionable provisions. By the way, there will no doubt be lawsuits to urge differing interpretations when the time comes, which will also involve expenditure of tax money to pay for the government’s defense of its interpretations.

Since I think the federal government has an important role in making the country functional and in smoothing out potential chaos among the several states, I don’t mind paying taxes. But under this new scheme, I have considerable doubt about the harm that we all may face because the tax cuts increase government debt, which lessens government ability to perform the functions I think it should be performing.

And I confess that I resent it when I’m paying tax—which I will be—and the current inhabitant of the White House and his family are not only not paying tax, but are getting a windfall. My own circumstances are such that I won’t be awfully hurt by the changes financially, but I certainly won’t be helped.

To those who celebrate their tax cut but who aren’t corporate persons? Take a long look at what the real effect is of the so-called middle class tax cut, especially how it may look when it ends in eight to ten years. Be sure to invest some of that additional money in water filters and perhaps breathing masks, depending on where you live, because enforcement of what air and water quality standards remain in the wake of gutting the Environmental Protection Agency will be spotty due to lack of funding.

Plan your travel carefully, as infrastructure continues to deteriorate. Where taxes aren’t available to pay for improvements,  private investors will be invited to  build roads and bridges. They’re going to want to get a return on their investment, probably as tolls. But if the roads and bridges don’t promise a profit, investors may be hard to come by. Maybe we can get local ferries running again, in the less traveled parts of such rivers as the Kennebec or the Androscoggin in Maine?

And for heavens sake, DON’T get sick! Between a weakened Food and Drug Administration and the burdens on states by “reforming” Medicare and Medicaid, already hard-pressed hospital services will become more curtailed or more expensive or both. You should probably start growing your own food, too, just to be safe.

Or, alternatively, in November, let’s just get rid of these folks who talk a good talk that bears little relationship to reality, and get the country back on the track the majority of us thought we were on in 2016 and still support. It’s not a bad thing to learn we can’t take our founding principles for granted. Now that we’ve done that, let’s take the lesson to heart and turn out this coming November.

Or be ready to invite Belizean ferry operators to show us how to build low cost, low tech ferries to get our cars across the upriver inland fords.