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Perhaps like me you received an e-mail recently forwarding a column by now-retired columnist Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. People love the column because he blames politicians for all of our ills. If you haven’t seen it, you can easily find it on the internet.
Suffice to say that Reese claims 545 people have created all of our problems (435 members of Congress, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices). He omits the Federal Reserve Board because that “problem” also was created by Congress. Interestingly enough, good old Charley also omits all special interests and lobbyists because they have no “legal authority.” After all it’s a politician’s duty to reject special interest money. I can’t tell you how many accolades for Charley Reese’s column accompanied the e-mail I received. There is one major flaw in Reese’s reasoning: Charley doesn’t mention who elected Congress and the president — you and me.
No matter how superior you would like to feel compared to politicians, they are you and me. They are not a special breed grown in some hot house in Washington. They are not sprung from alien pods. Although you would like to think differently, they may be no more dishonest than members of any occupation, including your own. Politicians are us.
Although voters profess an intense dislike for politicians in the polls, they keep voting for the same folks over and over and over again. Incumbents win so often that voters often cry out for term limitations, but they can effectively impose term limitations by voting incumbents out of office. But, you shout, after I vote for a politician, they ignore my wishes once in office. Actually they don’t. Politicians of both parties hear you, they just find it impossible to give you what you want.
You seek more government services and lower taxes! Politicians know you are incredibly misinformed about the cost of government or that you have the mentality of a self-absorbed teenager. The same polls show that there are basically two things you are willing to see happen in order to fund the things like Medicare and Social Security that you really care about — higher taxes on the rich and less, if not a total elimination, of all foreign aid.
Here’s the problem — as much as it pains me to say it — higher taxes on the rich (even if you believe someone making $250,000 is actually rich) is that it won’t eliminate the deficit. Incidentally, as honorable and noble that most of us are, the real reason we can agree on taxing the rich is that most of us aren’t rich.
How about eliminating foreign aid? Even though many of you have told pollsters that you believe this nation spends about 40 percent of its budget on foreign aid, we don’t. We don’t come close. We actually spend a paltry 1 percent on foreign aid. And much of that is self-serving because it protects our own butt and is considered helpful to national security.
Back to Charley Reese for a moment, who I hope is enjoying a nice retirement. Whoever attached his column to the e-mail being circulated ends the column with a poem about high taxes, and then proceeds to list all the various taxes we pay. The anonymous writer, not Charley (who may or may not be a Tea Party adherent), goes on to point out that none of the listed taxes existed 100 years ago and “our nation was the most prosperous in the world.” We had no national debt, the largest middle class in the world, guess what- — Mom stayed home to raise the kids.
I never thought I’d see the day when someone could get so nostalgic over our way of life in 1911. I don’t think Mom is very nostalgic about going back to a time when she couldn’t vote and had to spend most of her waking hours laboring for Dad and the kids. You know what else didn’t exist? There were no child labor laws to stop kids slaving in sweatshops. The Great Depression had not happened. September 11th was just another date. There was no Medicare, Social Security or unemployment compensation. And most of us rode horses, not in cars. If you’d like to return to the good old days, I’ve got a time machine in my backyard I’d like to sell you.
Taxes pay for your safety net so you won’t wind up on the streets dreaming of the great times folks had 100 years ago. They also pay for the military that polls show you don’t want to cut, but apparently don’t want to pay for either. They pay to educate your kids and grandkids. They pay for bridges and roads that get neglected every time some poll pandering to your wishes cuts the budget and doesn’t increase taxes.
Dear Charley Reese and your fellow admirers, you get the kind of government you deserve. You get the kind of representation you deserve when you either don’t bother to get informed on the issues or don’t bother to show up at the polls because it drizzled the day or you had to take the dog to the groomer.
Let’s all take a good look in the mirror. We have met the enemy of efficient and necessary government and it is not the politicians.
It’s us. SPR
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