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Democracy in Peril

By Steve Sebelius

SITUATIONAL ETHICS: You've got to hand it to the right-wingers: What they lack in compassion they more than make up for in having no sense of humor.

Take, for example, the website of Nevadans for Sound Government, the group dedicated to erasing the taxes passed by the 2003 Legislature. The address: www.taxlovers.com.

Tax lovers. Oh, we get it.

Unfortunately, like some of the rhetoric that appears on the deceptively well-designed web page, it's wrong. Nobody on the liberal side of the aisle loves taxes. Quite the opposite, in fact. Taxes are dangerous, career-killing things that can be easily exploited by the rhetorical juggernaught that says taxes are bad and evil and un-American. And that's something only the Democrats can love.

But while Democrats and liberals and progressives don't love taxes, they do love the things that taxes can provide. Food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, job programs for those left behind by the vagaries of the free market.

And Democrats aren't alone. Everybody--even Republicans--loves things like a strong national defense, police and firefighters and the roads on which our national economy depends to get goods to market.

Republicans don't mind taxes when they're flowing to companies like Halliburton, even when it's shown that the company employs bribe-takers and does business with overcharging Kuwaiti fuel suppliers.

Republicans don't complain about taxes when they're dolloped out to big corporations as welfare payments, or when those dollars are used to pay for insurance for nuclear power plants that could never buy coverage in their vaunted free market.

Republians sit mute when tax dollars are used to buy bigger, newer defense systems, even after the military says they're not needed. Unproven missile defense technology? Not a peep from the right.

But give a homeless person a sandwich and a roof over his head for a night, and the bitching about bootstraps will never end.

For too long, conservatives have been allowed to get away with complaining about taxes without being challenged by liberals to defend their stance. It's high time liberals stood up and reminded people that the money they pay in taxes buys things that this country desperately needs, things like roads, schools, police, courts, a strong military and important scientific research that can help millions around the globe.

So the next time you hear a right-winger bitching about taxes, ask him if he's driven on a government-financed road lately.

Steve Sebelius writes a daily e-mail newsletter, the E-Briefing, upon which Democracy in Peril is based. To subscribe to the E-Briefing at a Mercury reader special price of $20 per year, go to www.lasvegasmercury.com/ebriefing.