Responding to a heated discussion at Blue Mass Group, Charley has a great post about the Free Lunch mentality among many of the gubernatorial candidates:
Let’s just remember that when you pay taxes, you’re buying something. Maybe you’re getting well-built roads and honest cops and judges and good schools and a safe country; and maybe you’re buying cushy jobs for political cronies, tunnels that leak, and “shareholder value” for war profiteers and oil companies (who could really use the scratch, after all).
But it seems to me that when a politician — i.e. the salesperson — says you can pay less and not have to suffer for it, doesn’t it behoove one to ask what you’re not going to be buying with your tax dollar? And doesn’t it behoove the pol to have a damn good answer to that?
On the substance, I agree with Charlie wholeheartedly - we should resist Free Lunchism, and the news media should help us do the numbers behind the campaigns’ promises. And the notion of a high tax burden is somewhat ideological (in the Marxist sense of illusory): as the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center points out, when expressed as a percentage of personal income, our total state and local tax burden is one of the lower in the country.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if the tax revolt in the state - and it is a sentiment that’s real and alive - isn’t merely ideology but also a frustration over policy that’s expressed in the only possible outlet. That is, a significant sector of the electorate - not everyone of course, but not merely registered Republicans - thinks the state shoulders too high a burden of social services. To take that same Mass Budget factsheet…
Source: Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center
… you’ll see that of our public expenditures, only about 35 percent takes the form of that noncontroversial cops, teachers and firemen of Charley’s example. Another 15 plus goes to things that probably no one is excited to spend money but which requires spending nonetheless, like debt servicing and infrastructure. That leaves 50 percent of our tax dollars going to health care and social services, largely for the needy, the indigent and the disabled. No one is going to come out and say “I’m cutting services for the poor and the disabled,” but sub rosa, a lot of citizens believe our spending on social services is too high.
Now, I’m not one of those people. To me, a humane society is one that takes care of those who can’t take care of themselves, especially since our economic system has long eroded the bonds of kinship that in previous times served as a care provider of last resort. And I’m not trying to make the tax-cutting case for the conservatives. I do think, however, that liberals would be better off actively arguing for the positive impact of social services in the Commonwealth (not a hard case: Massachusetts comes out fairly positively in comparisons with other states, I think), instead of assuming that all voters see eye to eye or agree on the level of services we’re paying for. Otherwise, we might find ourselves at Election Day saying “you have to pay for what government provides” only to have voters say they want the smaller, cheaper version instead.
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