Chief of Police of Malibu

builds the fewest roads and mass-transit systems, has the least structurally sound bridges, provides the shoddiest armor and health care to its soldiers, devotes to fewest resources to educating its children, depends most on the magic of the market to keep its citizens healthy and productive, takes the least action to alleviate multi-generational and race-based poverty, provides the most inconsistent protection to its ports and borders, does the least to prevent or punish deceptive mortgage-makers from catalyzing massive waves of foreclosures, stands by in the face of the largest-scale immiseration of the formerly most powerful consumer-spending middle class in the world and the most dramatic concentration of wealth in the industrialized world.

If this not, in fact, a description of the government which governs best, but rather the government which is shirking important responsibilities; if a government that governs best should actually attend to these issues, rather than put its head in the sand and hope for the best; if, especially in the midst of a financial crisis and on the cusp of a recession, the government should be devoting resources to improving the country’s physical, educational, and economic infrastructure; then these resources have to come from somewhere.  However, the US government has spent so frivlously on military adventurism, overfilling the feeding troughs of private government contractors, and handing out enormous tax-giveaways to a tiny group of very wealthy people, that we’ve been building our government’s debt in the past eight years like never before.

Thus, it is unwise (and perhaps soon will be impossible) to fix these problems on our national credit card.  So if we want to fix this country’s problems, we really ought to raise the resources in the form of hard cash, instead of increased deficit spending.  If it can be agreed that a) we ought to expend resources on fixing these problems, and b) we ought not to do it by means of more borrowing, then we have one choice: higher taxes for somebody.

The question then is, for whom?  A lot of people in America today are hurting financially–the country’s middle and lower class.  They cannot afford to stretch themselves any further than they are already stretched.

A few people (1%) are not hurting–and it so happens that those people are not only not hurting, but have more than doubled their real incomes (that is, even after adjusting for inflation their incomes have doubled) since 1993.  If we have a lot problems to deal with (and we do), and those problems will be expensive to fix (and they will), then the people who make the most money should be asked to contribute more to fix those problems.  The top 1% of Americans were taking home 23% of the nation’s income in 2006.  The top 10% were taking almost half of the country’s income.

We can’t afford to negelect our country’s expensive problems any longer.  And we can’t afford to increase our deficits any more.  And people who are losing jobs and houses and seeing their take-home pay stagnate and yield bigger and bigger bites to health insurance, food prices and gas prices can’t afford to pay to fix these problems.  The small group of Americans who control the lion’s share of the country’s wealth are the ones who can, and that’s why they should–there is no other choice but to drown ourselves in an ever-greater mountain of debt or to let our country go down the tubes by neglecting to fix our country’s problems.

It may be against some economists’ theories and free-market ideology that tax rates be made more progressive and the wealthier be asked to contribute a larger share, but because of the road the Bush administration has led us down, to do otherwise would be dangerous to America’s future, and this country’s future is too important for anyone’s ideology to come first and country to come second.