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Giving and Taking from the Common Pool

By Betsy Leondar-Wright
December 18, 2003

Ten years ago my father became debilitated with Alzheimer’s disease. At a certain point it became clear that it wasn’t safe for him to live at home. At sundown he would begin to frantically swing his fists, sometimes narrowly missing his wife or banging into walls. He went into a special nursing home ward for people with dementia, and the 24-hour care and simple surroundings calmed him down and kept him safe.

However, the price tag for that special care was extremely high, and within a couple years his savings and his wife’s were gone. If our family had had to pick up the tab at that point, half of the take-home pay of my three sisters, myself, and my stepmother combined would not have been enough to cover the bill. Medicaid stepped in and has paid for my dad’s nursing home ever since. I am grateful to the taxpayers who have helped my family cope with my dad’s difficult old age.

In October, the budget chief of Massachusetts Governor Romney, Eric Kriss, divided the state’s residents into “givers” and “takers” of state money, saying that to solve the budget shortfall, “We need to change the ratio between givers and takers.” By his standards, my family members were givers for decades and then became takers due to my father’s disability.

The truth is that we are all both givers to and takers from the common pool. All of us pay taxes (sales taxes, if nothing else), and all of us get government benefits to varying degrees.

Recently I led a workshop on state budget crises for a group of human service workers. I asked them to pair up, go through an imaginary day, and make a list of ways they benefited from government spending. One woman came up to me and said she couldn’t do the exercise because there would be nothing on her list. I said I’d make her a bet that she’d come up with something. “You’re on,” she said. Five minutes later, she was back, saying, “The bet’s off.” And indeed, all the pairs came back with long lists including roads, schools, public transportation and libraries, and in some cases help with childcare, college, housing or healthcare.

No one enjoys paying taxes, yet after a sober look at the alternatives, most of us put it into the same category as flossing our teeth and eating our vegetables. But the Bush administration has already pushed through two tax cuts targeted at multi-millionaires. The President wants still more tax breaks for the very wealthy, including complete elimination of the estate tax, a boon for the true “takers,” heirs of multi-million dollar estates.

The progressive nature of the federal income tax is under attack. An organized lobby of high-earners whines that their incentive to strive is taken away by higher marginal rates. Supposedly this limits economic growth. Yet they are paying lower top rates now than during some of the fastest-growing economic eras in American history, such as 70 percent in the 1960s and 39.6 percent in the 1990s.

Except for the federal income tax, almost all other taxes fall more heavily on lower-income and middle-class people than on millionaires. The payroll tax for Social Security starts on the first dollar of pay, but isn’t paid on any income over $87,000. State and local taxes add up to 11.4 percent of income for the fifth of Americans with the lowest incomes, 9.6 percent for the middle fifth, and only 5.2 percent for the richest one percent. Those who can best afford to pitch into the common pool are in fact stretching the least.

Conservatives love to paint recipients of government benefits as lazy people who choose not to work. In fact, the overwhelming majority face severe disabilities, old age, domestic violence, lay-offs, unexpected single parenthood, poverty-level wages or other misfortunes.

If you find yourself with no-one in your family like my dad, needing a lot of government assistance, I hope you’ll count your blessings – and pay your taxes cheerfully.

Betsy Leondar-Wright is the Communications Director at United for a Fair Economy and the co-author of “Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap.”