Somebody’s Gotta Pay
I bought my shellfish/seaweed license yesterday. $25. Us old timers can remember when there was no license and no fee. True of lots of things, I guess. Parks were free once. I still don’t need a bicycle license — but I bet you the cost of my boat trailer tabs I will soon. A nickel here, a dime there — you can run a government on it. You just can’t run it well. And the worse it runs, the louder the clamor to get rid of more of it.
I didn’t mind paying 25 bucks, but I remember when that 25 bucks would have been hard to come up with. Poor folks pay the same as rich folks. Some people see this as fair, almost a Natural Law: we all pay the same. Sales tax, same for Bill Gates as you. Property taxes, same for Jeff Bezos as me. Federal income tax, I bet a whole lot of rich folks pay less than us. That’s the trouble with laws made by rich people — they make the rules skew in their favor. But they do it so we won’t notice. I suppose we might do the same thing in their place. That’s the real Natural Law.
The older I get, and the more well off I get, the less angry I feel about this. But when I remember what it was like trying to make a Go of it on the economically challenged South End, the more empathy I have for those who don’t have money … or power … or a voice in a country that equates the poor with losers and slackards and illegal aliens. A lot of folks lack much sympathy, it seems obvious, and you can’t legislate Compassion.
Angry folks are making laws now. After 9-11 angry folks were most of us and look where that took us. In the middle of two expensive wars we lost we had a recession that rivalled the Great Depression. And when the dust cleared we blamed the damn government. And we blamed the poor and the immigrants and the folks who can’t find work for the deficits. Like maybe they got the weapons of mass destruction. Like they’re responsible for the World Trade Center bombings. I guess we got to blame somebody. And punish them. And to hell if they’re the innocent ones. Somebody’s gotta pay. And it sure won’t be ourselves.
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