Let’s see. The July 18 Philadelphia Inquirer had a page-one headline, “Towns’ taxes soar as N.J. tightens belt.” It seems that while the average total property-tax of typical towns like Swedesboro, Woolwich, Monroe, Woodbury Heights and others jumped 130 percent or less between 2000 and 2009, Trenton wants to put a cap on how much towns may tax their residents at a puny 2 percent annually. Maybe they need the crew that took three months to choke off the hemorrhage of oil in the Gulf. The state takes much of that real-estate tax and pays Washington for its voracious appetite. After all, you didn’t think, did you, that that paltry amount you pay Uncle Sam and his IRS pays your whole federal bill.
Paltry? Then it’s all the more galling to read the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finding that the U.S. is one of the world’ tax-friendliest nations. An American couple with two children has an average tax rate of 11 percent while one in France pays 41 percent and others in Germany and Italy pay 35. We’re so friendly that we took the deregulation doctrine of the tea party folks and saw to it that from 1998 to 2005, two thirds of U.S corporations with sales of $2.5 trillion paid no taxes. Yet just a few months ago we heard outraged cries against universal health insurance, the kind they have in Europe with huge public approval now for a half century or more. They like it this way because they enjoy the many social services gotten with those hefty taxes. With a suspicion Europeans cannot fathom, we darkly view their economics as socialism.
What do we Americans get for our tax money, which is supposed to be so light a burden? By bipartisan choice we get and have gotten since what General and GOP President Eisenhower warned us against: an omnivorous military-industrial complex. Americans pay more for arms than do all the rest of the nations combined. We seem to like it that way. So do they. This frees up our European and other allies to spend their government money in ways that more directly help ordinary people, sparing them the need for outlandishly huge defense outlays. The U.S. is the hired army for the world. We police at our expense all the globe as though there were no United Nations. And we like it that way because we can invade at will countries like Afghanistan, so weak and unable to arrest al-Qaeda leaders, or Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but had to serve as scapegoat in our frustration at being unable to catch Saddam’s fellow Moslem but known hated enemy, Osama bin Laden.
A look at our federal budget is sobering. For 2010 it is about $3.5 trillion. Of this, $2.2 trillion is “non-discretionary,” meaning that Congress and president do not have the discretion of forgetting about it. It covers Social Security ($695 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($743 billion), and interest on the national debt, much of which is war-related ($164 billion). These will soar as baby boomers age. The remaining $1.3 trillion is divided up unequally with Defense getting a little less than two thirds: $534 billion outright to the Pentagon, not counting what the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns cost; $55 billion for Veterans Affairs; $205 billion for those “contingency operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan including $76 billion for 2009; at least $32 billion for “black operations,” and $40 billion for the Energy Department which — isn’t this clever? — is strategically saddled with the military cost of our nuclear arsenal. And forget about NASA and the $43 billion for Homeland Security. They’re extra.
At this point true believers say we should be spending even more. They have a vocal part in the national discussion about our present and future priorities. They want you to pay more for the above, saying that it is in the national interest. They are ashamed that conservative Ronald Reagan spent only $77 billion one year for defense. They warn darkly about vigilance, never confessing how wrong they have been in our previous military fiascos. They use fear while dodging the gargantuan expenses catalogued above. Facts like these are public knowledge, yet opportunists seeking either re-election or military contracts have long enjoyed the fruits of our collective amnesia, that fatal flaw whereby our national memory span is about 15 minutes.
Catholics and others with a conscience know that popes and bishops have said the above in countless ways and venues. Yet because we expect religious leaders to say such non-military things, we tend to disvalue their criticism. So, arguably, God will teach us either by our coming to a rational appreciation of peacemaking or else by taxes we fume are much too high now.
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