By Dr. John Gilmore
When Bill Meyer was about to retire he
gave an excellent speech on the idea of the Commonwealth. He said he
was born in a very poor neighborhood, but didn’t even really knew it
because we all shared in the commonwealth when he was growing up.
There were parks, free summer recreational programs, free after
school programs, free music programs in the schools and art programs.
Sometimes they even had free summer camps sponsored by the counties
or cities. Anyone could be involved in a sports program for just the
cost of a two dollar insurance policy each year and the school
provided buses that would take the children to the away games on the
weekend.
We don’t have many of these programs
because of the movement led by rich people to disassemble the
commonwealth and do away with taxes. As a result of this people end
up paying for all of these programs as if they are a privilege. Many
people spend hours of time driving miles to carry their children to
soccer games and other sports activities, thus spending the money
they thought they had saved in taxes on time and for gas. Now only
the ones who can afford it send their children to music programs and
to art classes. Just think of all of the great musicians from poor
families who started playing their instrument in school. This won’t
happen now in most school districts.
Now people who can afford it have to
pay for day care, pay to go to parks, pay to go to the beaches, and
the many other things that add to the quality of life for all
citizens, allowing us to share in the riches of the nation as a whole
group instead of as individuals working and struggling to buy what is
necessary to enjoy the fruit of American life.
As we cut taxes the savings are now
being funneled into overseas investments that put us out jobs and
foreign wars—especially to defense contractors. The states and
local governments are broke, so they need to raise state a local
taxes while cutting the services we so desperately need. In the long
run the average person ends up paying more for services than he paid
for taxes, while the rich person has an opportunity to invest in
China and send their children to the best schools, concerts, music
programs and so on so they can make us look like failures when we try
to compete against them. As a result of this the rich communities get
good resources while the average and poor ones decline until they
begin to look like the slums in most Latin American countries. We
end up with beautiful homes in one block and torn up ghettos right in
the next block, except for the most rich areas—all because we don’t
want to support each other by paying taxes.
The sad thing is that the amount of
taxes never go down, they only get transferred from the federal
government to state and local governments, utility fees, park fees,
higher car registration costs and licensing fees. We end up paying
the same amount of taxes for no service. That is why I like the idea
of a tax and spend government as long as the money is being spent on
the people who are being taxed instead of on foreign wars and foreign
investments. It is strange that anytime we hear the words tax and
spend government from the corporate media we are hearing it from a
person who’s income is highly invested in stocks in foreign countries
that are taking our jobs. They tell us we can’t depend on the
government to take care of us, but we can depend on private
corporations. That doesn’t even make sense, when you really think
about it. We can pressure the elected government to make changes in
its spending patterns; we cannot do anything to corporations.