Nobody likes taxes, but everybody believes in the common good. If we believed that our taxes paid for the common good, we would pay our fair share. They do pay for the common good. They pay for the public schools. Yet a minority of Americans has chosen to believe a contrary mythology, the Myth of the Tax-fed Bureaucrat.
It goes like this: when the powerful business-owner has more money to spend, it benefits all the hard-working citizens of this land, but if anyone serving the public has more money, for example, the public schools, it is wasted on bureaucracy and pension funds. Taxes only feed bureaucrats. This is the shameless myth behind the budget-cutting strategy of Congressional Republicans.
Taxes pay for the common good. While we’re remorselessly cutting our deficits, let’s also cut to the chase on taxes. Taxes support our schools, not big business. Taxes support long-term school reform, not the short-term stimuli that private foundations generously provide. Taxes buy the time during and after the school day that teachers need to collaborate and develop their curriculum and craft. And yes, taxes allow teachers with thirty or forty years of unbroken service to retire and allow younger teachers with fresh energy and ideas to take their place.
When the prosperous refuse to pay taxes, they are undermining our public education system. The revenue they are hoarding for a sunny day is sucked out of the budgets of local schools, as surely as if they tapped the bank accounts of every public school employee. Permanent school funding comes from nowhere else, the Gates and Broad Foundations notwithstanding.
Every dollar that oil executives and hedge-fund managers refuse to contribute to overcome our national deficit is depleting our educational capital. Every dollar that the wealthiest two per cent of our nation continues to hoard is depleting our intellectual infrastructure. The notion that taxes only benefit the Washington fat-cats is a myth concocted by the wealthy. Taxes pay for the modest public school systems we have. Even school superintendents are paid on the cheap, compared with the massive bonuses of CEO’s.
The citizens of this country whose children attend public schools constitute a majority. If they accepted the cold reality that budget-cutting without additional revenue will sacrifice their children’s education to benefit the wealthy, they would rise up in unison and say “No!” No, you may not lay-off the next generation of teachers. No, you may not close neighborhood schools. No, you may not pack our classes with forty students or more. No, you may not expel our programs of music and art. No, you may not charge participation fees for athletics.
All of these things will come to pass in every public school, not just the blighted urban ones, if ruthless deficit-cutting is not softened by additional revenue. Public funds must pay for schools or the public will pay an intellectual and emotional toll. As surely as night follows day, our schools will pay. Our teachers will pay. Our children will pay.
Waste will be cut. We are talking about trillions of dollars of waste. But taxes pay for our schools, and schools waste very little by comparison with larger bureaucracy.
Public schools rely on public funds. Citizens of public schools, don’t let Congress suck the money out of our schools. Don’t let massive tax breaks that drain our public resources fill the coffers of the wealthy at the expense of the actual tax-payers. Don’t succumb to the myth of the Tax-fed Bureaucrat. Believe in the gospel of the Common Good. Believe that taxes pay for the common good, the common school. Let everyone pay for these schools and pay what they can afford.
The public school majority said, Amen!