By Lloyd E. Sheaffer
April 15 is a date right up there with D-Day, the Ides of March, and the day your mother-in-law moved in with you as a day filled with clenched teeth and rueful regrets. It is tax day for most ordinary U.S. citizens and is likely the most grumble-filled date on the Gregorian calendar. Not everyone runs amok on the 15th of the fourth month, though I, for one, do not mind paying taxes.
Lloyd Sheaffer
Now before the tea party crowd blows its collective kettle lid, note I did not say I like paying taxes; I said I do not mind paying taxes. Our tax bill is the tab we pay to live in a democracy that allows all to live as free people, even free to criticize the very system that protects and supports its citizenry.
A point – or perhaps the point – to start examining this issue takes us back to 1787 with the words many of us memorized in fifth or sixth grade:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The “Blessings of Liberty” alluded to in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution provide freedom, but they carry costs. Providing for the “common defence,” whether from a diminutive, hairstyle-challenged autocrat or from insidious terror cells, requires prodigious funds, expenses we all share for our collective safety.
Promoting “the general Welfare” – which means “health, happiness, or prosperity; or well-being,” not a much-maligned government program ¬– incurs momentous costs. All citizens benefit from a safe and sound infrastructure of roads, bridges, and transportation systems. All residents of the nation live more healthful lives if water and waste systems function properly and fouled air is cleaned. All people have a greater chance for material and emotional prosperity if public education is fully funded and appropriately conducted.
Unfortunately, "Justice and domestic Tranquility" too often in our time appear to be unfulfilled visions of our forefathers. Without adequate finances, our laws that ensure fairness and encourage peaceable neighborhoods cannot be sufficiently enforced by police officers and court officials.
Again, our liberty carries costs that need to be borne by its benefactors.
Perhaps in the rootin’-tootin’ days of the wide open western frontier of the mid-19th century, a citizen could eke out a life in which government involvement in daily lives was less needed. Twenty-first century citizens awaken daily to convoluted and complex challenges never imagined by our ancestors living in a go-it-alone, take-care-of-my-own world of yesteryear.
Few people, regardless of political leanings, can deny our federal tax system is broken. What was established first as a graduated system seems to have devolved into a more and more regressive tax structure.
Despite the wretchedness of our current system, I still do not mind paying my share of taxes because, frankly, we need our constituted government to make certain we “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” While we do live under these “Blessings of Liberty,” the United States of America does not appear to be a happy nation in this era of incivility, ultra-partisanship, and violence.
As unlikely as it might strike many people, some connections seem to exist between a nation’s level of happiness and its taxation system. A 2012 article entitled “What is a Good Society? Taxation and Happiness” reports on a study conducted at the University of Virginia. The lead researcher, Shigehiro Oishi, reports, "[A] key to a happy society is quality public and common goods. [A]s long as it [society] can afford good public transportation, education system, health care, and so forth, citizens are likely to be happy."
Oishi goes on to “identify the taxation system in which citizens are the most satisfied with their lives in general. Considering the main political debate has been between progressive taxation (the rich pays the higher rate of tax) and flat taxation (everyone pays the same rate of tax), we examined the relation between the degree of progressive taxation and the average happiness of citizens across 54 nations.”
“The bottom line: The residents of the nations with more progressive taxation were happier than those of the nations with less progressive taxation.”
I am not an apologist for a progressive tax system nor an advocate for a flat tax system; I am neither a champion of tax cuts nor a proponent of tax increases. I am a citizen and a voter and a taxpayer who sees the necessity for all who benefit from our democratic form of government to contribute to the “general Welfare” through indispensable taxes.
Envisioning a day when citizens equate paying taxes with happiness is clearly a pipe dream. Nonetheless, if our citizenry can set aside the acrimony felt toward much of our constituted and ordained government and encourage elected officials at all levels to bring genuine reform to our maimed tax system, the day may come when citizens see paying taxes, not as an onerous legal obligation, but as a moral obligation that promotes a “more perfect Union” and truly “secures the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Until that time comes, sooner rather than later for the sake of us all, I hope you won’t mind paying your duty, even though you don’t like doing so.
“Happy” Tax Day.
Lloyd E. Sheaffer is a community columnist for Pennlive/The Patriot-News.