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March 16, 2009
"That's our money."
Is it really? Although I wish their numbers were in the millions, naturally I'm delighted to see the Tea Party demonstrations attracting crowds numbering in the thousands. A remark by one demonstrator particularly caught my attention: Tea party supporters say their reasons for demonstrating on Fountain Square are simple.That's our money. In those three simple words, he summed up the whole problem in a nutshell. Not just the problem with the goverment, but the problem with the citizenry. The fact that it's our money is so basic as to not require explanation, much less extended commentary. We all know that, and I mean everyone, from left to right. Certainly every reader of this blog knows that the money the government spends comes from the taxpayers. So why bother to remark the obvious? Because for reasons that elude me, a large number of people do not understand that the government is simply not a huge, magical, money-producing pot. Nor is it a blank check. The worst thing about this is that many of the people who do not seem to understand this are intelligent and educated people who ought to know better. People who learned in school that the goverment derives its revenue from taxpayers, but who still think the government is a giant magical money pot. People who know that taxes are deducted from their paycheck, yet who somehow (through an inexplicable and irrational thought process) simply don't think it's their money. If I could understand the precise mechanism of how seemingly rational and thinking people can both know something and not know it at the same time, I could probably make millions. Or murder millions; Stalin famously observed that one man dead is a tragedy, a million men dead a statistic. The same principle is implicated with money. A guy who haggles over a couple of dollars will look the other way as the government automatically deducts thousands -- because he doesn't think the money is "his." Yet he knows it is, because he knows he earned it. Shrinks would call it denial, maybe cognitive dissonance. In the case of not knowing where the government gets its money, it's collective denial. People accept it because it happens to everyone else. (Yean, well, except those who make the rules....) If the government were to single out only one employee in ten for tax withholding, that would be seen as unfair. Not because of the tax withholding, but because people want to be treated equally. Yet that doesn't go far enough towards explaining the inexplicable. True, the fact that something happens to everybody makes it seem fair, but what explains the bizarre misperception that your money is not yours? The collective human mind is terrifying in its infinite capacity for denial. Which is why saying "That's our money!" is not as obvious as it seems. The fact is there are millions who would apparently say (with a straight face), "No, it's not our money!" And there are millions more who would say, "No, it's not your money; it's our money!" At the risk of sounding as if I'm endorsing the irrational, perhaps I should reemphasize what I've said in a number of posts: Your money is not yours! posted by Eric on 03.16.09 at 10:13 AM
Comments
It is a criminal mindset. Criminals really believe that your wallet is theirs, once they identify you as a mark. That's why they're willing to use violence to take it from you. It's THEIR money you're keeping from them. The worst thing we ever allowed was payroll withholding. The psychology would be entirely different if we had to write a check each month. Mrs. du Toit · March 17, 2009 08:48 AM " The psychology would be entirely different if we had to write a check each month." Absolutely true. Having to write a check each month to the U.S. Treasury or having to march off to the Town Hall every week to pay your property tax would most certainly disabuse people of the notion that there is such a thing as "government money." Jim - PRS · March 18, 2009 04:10 AM This is one of the many things that makes me shake my head at folks who go ga-ga over getting a tax "refund"...It was your money to start with and the government just "borrowed" it for a time and is now returning it to you...without interest paid on the loan. (I realize that to pay that interest, the government would have to collect and keep even more taxes, but I think you get the point.) Yet people are thrilled to get their own money back. And that person down the block who is getting back more than he paid in? He's getting some of your money too. joated · March 18, 2009 07:27 AM Dear E.: That Stalin quote is apposite for me now, as I'm halfway through Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". Saw another good one today: E. Driscoll citing S. van der Beste, to the effect that for most of us, Orwell's "1984" is a warning; to the Left, it's a user's manual. And a Reaganism may apply; (I paraphrase) 'A communist is someone who has read Marx and Lenin; a conservative understands Marx and Lenin.' Enjoy your thought-provoking writing; Simon's too. It's a blog I can check infrequently but spend serious time with when I wish to catch up. Best, GFT Twiga · March 19, 2009 09:54 PM Post a comment
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I can't do HTML very well for links, so do a search for "tax cuts for greedy ivins" and read the first story: "Tax cuts for greedy bastids" by Molly Ivins. (bastid is, of course, my intentional misspelling)
It's a perfect distillation of someone who would be dumbfounded by your whole post.
With this great quote
How true it is. This tax cut(Bush's V) is beautifully designed and carefully crafted to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich.
Tax cuts are stealing money from the poor and giving it to the rich. That's just elementary economics.