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Editorial: Tax revenue is shared
Published 10:05am Friday, June 29, 2012We are weary of hearing people make this type of argument in reference to taxes:
“I don’t like my money paying for (insert controversial expense here).”
The controversial expense ranges from abortion to contraceptives to war to fighter jets to teachers having summers off to you name it. Anything under the sun, it seems.
The argument is flawed because the money collected for taxes does not belong to one person. It is not “my money.” Tax revenue, in America, belongs to the people as a whole. It is our money. Government, be it schools, counties, cities, states or federal, is the structure by which we debate how to spend that shared money and how it executes the services we collectively want.
It’s fine to say they don’t like spending taxes for the women’s health care organizations that perform abortions. It’s fine to say they don’t like taxes paying for wars. But let’s not pretend that tax money belongs to any one person. Please stop claiming taxes are “my money.”
Why? Simple. Once the funds leave your possession, they stop being yours. That holds true when making a purchase at a store or paying bills — or paying taxes.
The right we have in America is that once the taxes are taken from us, we have a say in what our government does with the money. In many countries, the people do not.
So let’s be grown-ups and not talk about taxes like children whining over candy. The argument of “what’s best for the country” sure has a better ring to it than “my money.”
Don’t look at tax spending as your dollars being spent? Move over Greece here we come. The liberals want everyone to think of government programs as free money. Get as many people on food stamps as you can because those dollars spent create jobs. But that money is taken from someone else and run thru an expensive government bureaucracy before getting to people that in some cases do not need it. That same money would have been spent on family’s of the people it was taken from and created the same amount or more jobs. Socialist redistribution of wealth has not worked in Europe. People have come to depend on the government for everything and when the government runs out of money the United States is expected to step in and send some of your tax dollars over there. If we stop thinking of tax dollars as our money we lose control of where it is spent. You can control where your tax dollars are spent by voting for conservative fiscal responsibility best represented by the Republican Party. Tax rates in MN between state and federal have exceeded the tax rates in some Canadian provinces’ and Canada provides so called free health care.