Taxes

There are a lot of NJ blogs that have been talking about taxes and how much of our income goes towards paying them. I understand that. I also understand that, when I was growing up, my dad (who was, admittedly, in the upper tax brackets of his day) paid closer to 60% of his income out in taxes. I think if you go back to the fifties and early sixties, the top marginal tax rate for Federal taxes was something like 70%. The top rate today is, what, 33%? and the state hits us up for, what, another 4-6%? So, my old man paid out more of his income for taxes at all levels than I do, so why should I complain? So, next let's ask what all these taxes at the state and local levels are paying for ('cause I'm not about to get into how our current president is truly harming this country by his fiscal [what he taxes and what he spends] policies in this post...I'll leave that one for another time.)

Hmmm...when I look at local budgets, the thing I notice is that education is just about the biggest line item on them. Education is also a very big line item on the state budget. Now, all my kids are long grown up and gone, (OK, my granddaughter is now in preschool, but she will not be a potential public school consumer until after the sixth grade: she gets to go to the Montessori school where my wife teaches for cheap until then) so I don't have any immediate personal benefit from supporting public school expenditures...except for the fact that the kids going to school now are the people who are going to be caring for me in my dotage. I don't know about the rest of you, but I want those people to know what the fuck they are doing when they have my fate in their hands. And it is even more than that selfish reason; I think that the world is a better place when people are truly educated. By truly educated, I mean a classical education in the arts and sciences. The better educated the general citizenry is, the better off we all are.

So, when somebody bitches and moans about paying taxes, one of the first things I want to know is where they stand on public education. (BTW, public education is probably the major cause for America's rise from a rural agrarian society to one of the great economic powers of all history.) Then I want them to tell me how we're going to provide a quality education (or at least the chance to obtain a quality education) to all our citizen children (child citizens?) while they cut spending on the schools.

As an aside, I personally think that Teaching (with a deliberate capital "T") should be a high status occupation and that Teachers should be both highly honored and very well compensated. Unfortunately, teaching (small "t") is not a high status occupation, so we get too many "teachers" who probably should be flipping burgers at Mickey D's rather than babysitting our kids. You want quality education, pay teachers what we pay journeyman pro athletes, and accord them about the same level of status. Then we'd get a lot more good teachers (and probably fewer attorneys) entering the field. 'Nuff said.

And it is not only the schools we need to think about. Especially at the state and local level, public spending is (or should be) pretty much all about maintaining/enhancing the general quality of our lives. We're talking about things like maintaining the roads, parks and libraries. We are talking about providing core services to the poor, the elderly, kids and those generally unable to fend for themselves. Now, you want to cut spending? Cut the size of the bureaucracy overseeing the actual service providers. Of course, that means there will be more opportunity for fraud both by recipients of government services and by those same service providers, but...well, if there are other choices consistent with maintaining certain basic levels of health and safety for all our citizens, please...tell me.