The Detroit News: Government is not the problem – nor is paying taxes for it
media mentionApril 11, 2012 at 1:00 am
By Gilda Z. Jacobs
On a wintry February day, I woke up, showered and got ready to take my little dog, Jake, for his morning walk.
It snowed during the night, and I was grateful that the snow had already been removed from the streets and sidewalks. Jake appreciated it, too.
As I reached the next block, I spotted emergency vehicles outside a home. I found out later that firefighters quickly put out a neighbor’s kitchen fire.
After breakfast, I downed my daily vitamins with a glass of tap water. Next I started my morning commute — 75 minutes to Lansing — traveling past my city’s “downtown” where the elementary school, public library and public recreation center are located.
I love my neighborhood for many reasons, but the biggest is that my two daughters were able to spend charmed childhoods riding their bikes safely to those buildings.
Why do I bring this all up? Public services. The water I showered with, the clear streets, the emergency vehicles, the treated water in which I downed my vitamins, my highway commute and the sense of community offered by the school, library and recreation center — all are made possible through public structures.
I bring this up during April because April 17 is Tax Day. Our taxes are due and many will vilify the tax filing day or April 14th’s so-called “Tax Freedom Day,” designated by an anti-tax group called the Tax Foundation that attempts to calculate how many days we work to earn enough money to pay our taxes.
They seem to argue that we work too many days to pay our taxes. But what gets ignored is why we pay taxes — for our health, safety, education and the freedoms we all enjoy as part of the American Dream.
Another problem with Tax Freedom Day is that, at the state level, it overlooks some serious discrepancies in the tax obligations one person pays compared to another. While we all benefit from the public goods delivered by state and local governments, some of us work far less than others to maintain them.
That’s because state and local taxes account for a much larger percentage of some people’s income than others. And, though it might seem surprising, it is the lowest-income people for whom taxes cost more.
In Michigan, if you make $15,000 a year or less, you pay nearly 9 percent of your income in state and local taxes. But the wealthiest — those earning $335,000 or more — pay 5.3 percent, according to an analysis by the Washington D.C.-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The institute also reports that that gap is about to widen as new state income tax changes go into effect that were passed in 2011 to help pay for business tax cuts. Low-income working families will see a bigger increase than wealthier households due to the reduction of the state Earned Income Tax Credit from 20 percent of the federal credit to 6 percent of the federal credit, starting in tax year 2012.
While there’s much disagreement about taxes, we can agree that we need clean drinking water, we need to know fire trucks will come when called and we need safe highways. These are all possible because of tax dollars. So as we near April 17, please pause to appreciate those firefighters, police officers and teachers who are helping us and all the services we enjoy all year.
And a reminder to the protesters: You will be driving on public streets, stopping at public lights, drinking tap water from municipal water systems, grabbing a burger from a restaurant inspected by the health department and maybe even using public toilets during a protest break. You can do this knowing that if there is a car accident or heart attack, emergency vehicles will respond.