Until President Bush and his GOP colleagues in Congress repeatedly beat it into my head, I had never realized just how much I deserved a major tax cut. "It's your money," Bush said a couple of thousand times during the campaign.
Perhaps, like me, you had been unaware of our patriotic duty to cash that refund check from the U.S. Treasury. "It's important to cut taxes so that Washington does not spend the surplus," Bush insisted. After all, according to endless Republican speakers, we taxpayers know better how to spend our own money than the federal government.
Thank you, Mr. Bush, for the compliments or, more accurately, the coddling. It may be flattering to be told I can spend money more wisely and responsibly than dreaded Washington can. But it is also demonstrably wrong.
My federal government, with its home office in Washington, D.C., does well hundreds of important things I want done and that I couldn't do if I kept every cent of taxes I owe.
During our lifetime, extraordinary things have been achieved. "It is impossible to imagine the private sector taking the lead in the rebuilding of Europe following World War II's devastation and destruction of a continent," Brookings Institution scholar Paul Light observes. After all, what would such an expensive and ambitious endeavor mean for the quarterly dividend or the stock price?
Tell me. Where would we and the world be today if the naysayers and tax-slashers had prevailed then with their short-sighted arguments that Europe's problems did not concern us, that the Marshall Plan was a dangerous and expensive Washington power grab?
Because of the taxes Americans have paid, the Great Lakes, only a generation ago facing death, are today alive, vital, providing economic and recreational, opportunities, and enlarging our spirit. The same can be said for the Potomac River, the Charles River, the Chicago River and the Chesapeake Bay. They are all today cleaner, healthier and more alive than they were 20 years ago.
It took public servants, more knowledgeable than I am, to use my tax dollars to help remove 99 percent of the lead from the air our children breathe. Our federal government, using the taxes we pay, purchases for us precious peace of mind that the fish and fowl our loved ones eat are clean, the medicines doctors prescribe are safe, and the professionals who fly planes and who control flights are more than just qualified.
Our nation today is more tolerant and more just than it was when the president was a child in West Texas. Why? Because the American people overwhelmingly rejected the argument that the federal government had no right to interfere with sovereign states denying equal rights to U.S. citizens living within their borders. Never again, declared the American people, acting through their instrument of justice, their federal government, would any American be denied service in a restaurant or the right to vote because of the color of her grandmother's skin.
It took a lot of tax dollars to provide health care to the elderly, to vaccinate our children, and to build and maintain national parks that, in one year, 289 million people's lives were better for having visited.
The Bush tax cuts will come at a cost. One place the White House has targeted for budget cuts is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The agency's Project Impact is slated to be terminated. After Seattle suffered that area's worst earthquake in 52 years, there was universal agreement that Project Impact funds enabled retrofitting of schools, firehouses and bridges, and helped owners reinforce their homes. As a direct result, lives and property were preserved. Individual citizens and local communities couldn't have done it alone.
Yes, the feds are far from perfect and can be maddeningly arrogant and indifferent. But the wilderness has been protected, diseases have been conquered and poverty has been reduced because of the taxes we have paid to the federal government.
Mark Shields is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.
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