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November 02, 2004
Point/Counterpoint - College Democrats
Have you ever driven a car on the interstate highway system? Have you ever been to a national park, like Yellowstone or Yosemite? How about education? Taking into consideration that you are in college now, it is a pretty safe bet that you or someone you know went to a public school.
What do all of these things have in common? They are all funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars.
As much as the Republican party likes to vilify taxes by saying that they amount to the government “stealing” money from “hard-working Americans,” the truth is that taxes are kind of like a membership fee for being an American. Every Americančor at least Americans who obey the lawčpays taxes, and every American benefits from services that those taxes allow the government to provide.
While there are some tasks that would be better left to private corporations, large-scale projects like building roads that span an entire country or setting aside land for every American to enjoy are best left up to the government to complete. Government is the only entity capable of dealing with the large amounts of resources and large amount of time that these tasks require to complete. Because the government is incapable of generating revenue on its own, it relies on its citizens to support it.
When the Republican party talks about cutting taxes, it is wise to wonder what services they are going to cut to make up for lost revenue.
When Governor Pawlenty made cuts to the state budget to avoid having to raise taxes, he cut many services beneficial to Minnesota’s quality of life. The budgets for highway maintenance and cleanup, education, and park conservation were all affected.
The results of these cuts are highways lined with trash and riddled with potholes, public schools that are firing teachers and cutting arts and music programs to make ends meet, and state parks that are so underfunded that they cannot pay rangers, whose job is ensuring the safety of park visitors. While it may be true that corporations are taxed so much that it is difficult for them to function, cutting taxes on them means that lost revenue has to be made up for somewhere else, either by cutting government services or taxing somebody else. Since many government agencies are already so cash-strapped that their budgets cannot be further reduced, the difference must be made up by taxing somebody else. That is the way the world works.
The question is, who should we tax more: a corporation operating on a multi-million dollar budget or a citizen who makes $20,000 a year?
- Carly Schaps
Posted by msveum at November 2, 2004 12:00 PM
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