Progressive Voices

It's tax time again. We pay taxes most every day, but the yearly ritual of gathering documents, filling out multiple forms, and writing one big check puts a hyper-focus on this process. Unfortunately, many people consider paying taxes to be a drain on their wallets, rather than the important civic responsibility it is. People all across the income spectrum pay taxes and every one of us should feel a stake in the down payments we are making in our future.

Taxes are the collective investments we make to create a quality of life that we all enjoy and have come to expect. These investments are essential to educating our current and future workforce, building and maintaining transportation systems, protecting our communities, and providing a sound public health structure.  Everyone benefits from strong, well maintained public structures. Today's North Carolina is the product of generations of investments made to serve the common good. Taxes have fueled North Carolina's growth, given us a wonderful quality of life, and helped make the Tar Heel State a player in the global economy.

A disconnect often exists between the taxes we pay and the benefits we gain from the public structures that are supported by those tax dollars. This is partly because the benefits are sometimes hard to see. When made more visible, even people with anti-tax sentiments often support the very structures and services that would suffer if we did not collect taxes. Last fall, Charlotte    residents overwhelming rejected a referendum to overturn a dedicated sales tax to fund public transportation projects. They understood that the benefit a highly efficient public transportation system would bring to their community far outweighed the cost of an extra tax on them.

Political leaders are also to blame for this disconnect. In order to appease anti-government, anti-tax activists, they too often miss opportunities to talk positively about the role taxes play in funding a prosperous and healthy society. In many ways, it's not unlike a parent who caters to a demanding child with the immediate gratification of sweets and junk food rather than helping them to learn the hard lessons of self-discipline and a healthy diet. In the world of public policy, tax cuts are often the equivalent of Twinkies and potato chips, while public spending in areas like education, transportation infrastructure and scientific research are the leafy green vegetables: smart, long-term investments that build a healthy economy and help individuals achieve economic security.

None of this is to imply that tax (and spending) systems don't have their share of problems that need fixing. State tax systems, in particular, are often unfair and tend to favor the wealthiest among us. Complaints of complexity and inefficiency are also well justified. Reforming our tax systems to make them fairer, simpler and more transparent would help to bolster public support. And, of course, advocates of all ideological persuasion agree on the need for constant vigilance to expose and end wasteful spending.

Still for all of the system's imperfections, our quality of life stands to suffer if anti-tax sentiment is allowed to prevail. Without sufficient taxes, society as we know it would be fundamentally different in a very negative way. Who would ensure we have clean water and safe food, organize a national defense, maintain parks and beaches, and educate our children? Some would suggest the private sector should meet those needs, but for public goods and services that benefit all of us, public funding is undoubtedly the most efficient and best approach.

So, this year, when tax day rolls around, do something different. Rather than jumping on the same tired old "taxes are bad" bandwagon, take a moment to think about the future rather than the present; a moment to look at the entire forest rather than just the trees in your immediate line of sight. Who knows? You might just find that you feel a pinch of civic pride in contributing to a system of public structures that remains, for all of its flaws, the best in the world.

Meg Gray is a public policy analyst at the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Progressive Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.