Cut the taxes and let the good times roll

National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996 by Denis Hickey

Like homing swallows each early April, in newspapers and other media, the messages arrive. Those promises of salvation from paying the full measure of our taxes.

Taxes, like the other inevitable, are bad, so goes the premise. Less tax is better, and no tax is the ultimate good.

Back in 1978, California's late Howard Jarvis got the modem revolt started with his Proposition 13. Jarvis, the Don Quixote of his day, showed the way to the promised land. And it was good.

By 1994, the politicians had learned that those who preach against taxes get elected. From there, it was but a sophistic leap to the corollary: Blessed are they who pay no taxes.

In 1980 and again in 1984, a candidate for the presidency, with Hollywood aplomb, assured the people that not only should taxation be curtailed but government itself should be looked at askance. Government was not the answer; government with its taxes was the problem. Armed not with ideas but with balmy promises and an avuncular personality, the likable one expounded simple panaceas. The people elected the latest Santa Claus.

During the ensuing Reagan tenure, the country got so mired in debt that no one now living will ever see the end of it. Paying the interest on that debt is backbreaking. Two `breadwinners' are required in most families, and many programs for the poor and ailing must be eliminated.

A euphoric 1988 presidential candidate intoned his own political epitaph: "Read my lips: No new taxes." When, two years later, George Bush's integrity compelled him to break his wild-eyed promise in view of the havoc it was wreaking on the national debt, the good man dug his own political grave.

Nonetheless, the antitax, antigovernment climate had been created and canonized. In 1994 a new batch of politicians borrowed the baton. In the mock drama of a new social contract they pledged the consummation of Reaganomics. Ever quoting their patron saint and vowing to continue his revolution, legions of antipolitician politicians emerged from lawyers' offices and millionaires' lairs. Less government and less tax!

Antigovernment "religious" leaders had heard the message even before the politicians. Jim Jones, he of the 1978 Guyana tragedy, was but an early leader in a wayward line of violence-prone religious dissenters from church and government. The harvest was ripe for the sickle. Government was the enemy. This perception was validated in 1993 when government agents righteously, but wrongfully, eradicated the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas.

The ashes of Waco were used to sanction the awful bloodbath at Oklahoma exactly two years later. The chief suspect: A government-trained killer from Desert Storm become bitterly antigovernment.

Tapping into an anger deposit incubated by ambitious politicians, inspired by pseudo-religious zeal, there sprang into being a motley, apparently unconnected group of self-appointed and self-proclaimed messiahs. Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski, bands of Montana "Freemen," and an assortment of neo-Nazis, militia, Aryans, skinheads and other saviors-by-destruction: Each began practicing a gospel most of them had barely preached. The preaching, however, had been done for them. The climate had been readied, the seed was sown. Government was bad; taxes were worse!

The mass media, though often wrongfully blamed for society's ills, does carry some guilt in this context. From newspapers to television, the media bring the messages. As a seeming public service they show us subtle stratagems by which we can pay less in taxes than we might have thought possible. They do not advocate the breaking of laws or cheating on taxes. But they do foster the attitude that it is both wise and good to pay a minimum of tax.

What counts is the consequences of paying less taxes. Either there is an increase in other people's taxes or there is a decrease in the treasury resources. The further consequence is either an increase in the national debt or a decrease of money available for the common good.

The "less taxes" creed can be a subtle exploitation of what is most selfish in our nature. An indispensable ingredient of our true social contract consists in each of us doing his or her fair part in footing the bill for the expenses required for running the country. A serious civics education would remind us that contributing to the national treasury is contributing to the betterment of all. Genuine patriotism demands no less.