Better Death Than Taxes

I haven’t written in over a month. While constraints of my time have been mostly to blame, I could also argue that it’s because I’ve been letting my irritation fester into a more and more severe infection of my political wound first opened on election night. And apparently it’s a highly infectious infection, because I can’t yank down our head honcho’s approval rating 25 percent all by my lonesome. But a lengthy list of enraging points has accumulated under my attention in recent weeks, and I think it’s time to discuss them. Consider this my linguistic hydrogen peroxide.

Since 2003, the liberals have been angry that their tax dollars have been going to fund a war they don’t support. Since January 20th, 2009, I have been getting gradually more angry about where my tax dollars will potentially be directed in the term to come. While the liberals have right to disagree with our war (despite, of course, our country’s unanimous favor of it at its commencement), and while they are more than welcome to dunk their W-2s in venom before sending them off to the IRS, I can’t help but take this opportunity, if for no reason other than to rub it in, to convince the Left that my party’s outrage is outstandingly more justified than theirs.

Let’s forget for a moment the underlying fact that, generally, conservatives are anti-tax and liberals love them like a premenstrual woman loves chocolate, so therefore all tax-related arguments between the sides could be boiled down to a quite simple broth. We’ll set aside the idea that any over-taxation receiving complaints from the whole of the Democratic Party is essentially its own fault due to the leftist origin of over-taxation, and we’ll let the hypocrisy of their tax protests silencing and somehow trumping ours go unnoticed. Maybe I’m taking too many liberties in forgetting all these little points, but it’s a strategy that’s been pretty popular lately, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The new administration hasn’t had control for more than three months yet, and their list of actions I disagree with already outnumbers that of the past 8 years (granted, I was 12 when Bush was first elected and admittedly paid little attention back then). I understand that our country is in major trouble, and that means our leaders have to take bold actions. But Obama and his crowd have taken all the wrong ones, and I hate that my tax dollars, already exorbitantly high, are going to be raised to pay for their unwise decisions. At least when the liberals begrudgingly shoved out cash for the war effort, it saved our freedom. I, on the other hand, fear that my taxes will go toward ensuring and expediting our elimination of freedom. That’s the difference.

When my taxes go toward paying back the billions upon billions of currently nonexistent dollars being used for corporate bailouts, I am funding the antithesis of free market capitalism. When I empty my wallet to the government for starting up extensive volunteer programs, I am stealing from private charities that do incredible work without DC’s help. When I find myself paying for former Guantanamo terrorists to apply for citizenship and welfare, I am handing cash to the mass murderers of our country’s September 11th victims.

A total of $800 billion has been either spent or budgeted for spending on the Iraq war. Yes, that’s a lot, and yes, I agree that a quick (but not hasty) exit strategy is needed. But when a good portion of this total is going to soldier salaries that I think we all agree are well earned, and when the first half of this budget was passed when both parties agreed that we had to take action post-attack, and when we notice that we’ve remained safe for the past six years because of this spending, I can justify it. How on earth can we justify the distribution of $825 billion in taxes to AIG execs and Nancy Pelosi’s city redecoration? There is no nobility hidden in those causes.

Our economy needs help. Ok. But printing money and accelerating inflation and increasing government spending by forcing every American citizen into inescapable red figures is the most counterproductive “fix-it” I’ve ever encountered. People keep talking about “our children’s debt.” But I’m young. This is my debt. Mine. And as someone who has thus far been very responsible with her personal credit, I’m not ok with that.

For being the party that’s supposedly against big business and the greed of the upper class, why are the Democrats being so quick to shove our money at them? At least when the Republicans overspent on war, it was for principals we believed in, not a complete doctrinal/pecuniary contradiction. Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that the choices Obama has made for the economy thus far will be worse in the long run than had he done nothing at all.

On the flip side, let’s think about where we’d be had we done nothing at all after September 11th.

You may push against us with all your sans-arms might, Democrats, but you can’t fool us into downright government theft just because you use terms like “bipartisan” and “reaching across the aisle.” We’re not as morally malleable as you. And keep in mind that we never had to shadily coerce you into war spending as you are trying to do to us now. Your persistence in pushing us beyond our dogmatic boundaries is just going to push the tea into the harbor.

Maybe this time it’ll be the Boston Tobacco Party.

You may want to come to terms with the idea of your taxes going to war causes, leftists, because you’re guiding us straight into a civil one.