Morning, Christy. I don’t live extravagantly. I pay my taxes. I wasn’t in debt pre-GF2005. I guess it’s all my fault.

Actually, I’m in the moron category. And so are my children. Now what?

“..we who refused to tax ourselves for the government services we demanded. “
Christy – there are a couple of states that have levied taxes to pay for the government services that were demanded…New York is one of them and for that, the state has been excoriated by the business press, economic developers, etc. etc. for decades. Yes, Albany is a complete mess..I fully admit it. But when I used to do economic development, I also used to deal with business people who would threaten to take their companies five miles over the border into PA, to hurt the community, precisely with the complaint that ‘their taxes are too high” (which reminds me of that scene from “1776″, actualy). In northern PA, where property taxes are much lower, most of the school districts contain large percentages of unpaved roads, which means that schools get closed not only for snow but also for other weather conditions that prevent the buses from picking up students. Those unpaved roads are one of the costs of low taxes, but business tends to feel ok with that.

“..we who refused to tax ourselves for the government services we demanded. “

You know, nobody at the federal level ever asked me whether I thought taxes ought to be levied to pay for the war in Iraq or anything else. I would have said yes, of course, because I well remember the soaring inflation in the early 1970s due to the government not taxing to pay for the Vietnam War.

I’ve never understood the whole right wing thing about not paying taxes to fund governmental services. Where I come from, honorable people pay their bills, both at home and concerning our public responsibilities. If we think we need more public school classrooms or better roads we pass referendums to tax ourselves to pay for them.

At the federal level, our representatives in Congress are supposed to assess whether spending is justified and if it is, they’re supposed to come up with the tax dollars to pay for it. During the Bush years, and well before for that matter, the spending part was really popular, but the paying for it component was often ignored. Give Bill Clinton (and even Ronald Reagan, although it pains me to say it) credit for raising taxes to pay for governmental services in order to keep deficits low. As any sensible person knows, low deficits mean the government is not competing with private business for a finite number of credit dollars, which is one reason tax increases actually are good for business in the long run–as the statistics prove.

While the right has been successful in cutting taxes, they can in no way be considered the least bit conservative when it comes to fiscal policy. Real conservatives believe in taking responsibility for their actions. The modern right has turned irresponsibility into an institutional art form. It’s one more disorienting part of modern life when you realize that modern fiscal conservatives are really liberals.

“I’ve never understood the whole right wing thing about not paying taxes to fund governmental services…”
Ah, but if you are the sort of person who believes that public schools are for ‘those sorts of people’ and that you are willing to pay for your children to go to a private school so that they will not have to mix with ‘those people’, then you resent having to pay taxes that will support public schools. That is the entire basis of why public schools are the quality that they are in the deep south. Once Brown vs. Board of Ed. took place, southerners gamed the system of integration by setting up private academies…and refused to raise taxes for public schools. It’s the same thing with other public services — if something benefits THEM, then they are willing to pay for it or put their heads in the trough for it. If it benefits a group they do not like, then they refuse to support taxes for it.

Ahh Christy
here’s something to fill your Sunday cuppa with ;)

and I refuse to get involved in this shameless (shameless, I tell you) bid to throw terminally cute photographs of baby animals into the mix here……….awwwwwwww………. Ellie, how could you???

There’s a photograph there? (I have Safari on Mac — do graphics show in comments elsewhere?)

Today’s bird is an ostrich. Just take a gander at those eyelashes, would you?

“What’s good for the gander is good for the ostrich,” eh?

Way OT: our paper, Statesman.com, had a review of the Baker book on The Bush Family, if you want to look it up.