Easy Answer

You may have seen this picture before. Or one like it. Someone posted this sign a couple of miles from where I live back in 2009. There was another sign like it, which read "Cut Spending," just down the street from me. And as someone who always carries a camera around with them, I took some pictures. After I posted some of them online, they popped up all over the place. Every so often, I look around for them. One was even used by The Atlantic. Or at least a crop of it was.

Turns out there's a thriving industry of businesses that take photos from the internet, modify them in some way, then sell the modified photo as their own work. It's a hazard of posting photos on Flickr. Or anywhere online, really.

But that's beside the point.

The point that I wanted to make here is that being anti-taxes is easy. Normally because most people who are anti-taxes are really anti-money-going-to-people-they-don't-like. People advocating for cutbacks in services that they actually use and value is fairly rare. Or, as the saying goes: "There's government spending, and then there's my government spending." And so people fight over whose ox is going to be gored.

There is an easy way to lower tax burdens, and most politicians have figured out what it is; simply borrow the money. Citizens receive the services they want and avoid taxes they don't want. At least for a time. Although, to be sure, it might be quite a long time. And it may turn out to be sustainable. A change in the economy might generate enough revenue to retire debts that previously lacked the funding sources to properly service them. It's a gamble, but gambles sometimes do pay off. The question here is how many people understand that they're rolling the dice?