If I were running for office, I would hire someone to design a clever bumper sticker expressing this concept: Vote for me. I may raise your taxes but promise to increase and improve the services you get from your government.
Do you think I’d have a chance, assuming I could actually accomplish what I promised? Maybe so, after people lose roads, plowing, schools, libraries, cops, fire departments, etc., all in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”
Responsibility for whom?
Here are a few lines from Paul Krugman’s op-ed in today’s New York Times:
The lights are going out all over America — literally.
…a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable.
...the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
…a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
reporter, writer, wife, mother, stepmother, grandmother, photographer, singer, knitter, swimmer -- not all at the same time songbird@birdsonawireblog.com
