Taxes

I'm a big supporter of taxes. Progressive taxes. Tom Friedman expressed my position excellently in his column today. (I did not hear Palin's remark from the debate as I have studiously avoided these farces, but reading it made my blood boil, too.) Friedman quotes the sagacious Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.

I had not heard that quotation before, but I'd seen something like it. From The Sweepers Calendar:

Every two or four years or so, a cadre of politicians, campaign advisers, and speech writers will try to buy your vote with a tax break. Keep in mind that the intelligent radio program that you have just heard, the poem you have just read, the medication that you are presently taking, were probably subsidized in some part with federal funds provided by United States taxpayers. Meanwhile, the trickle-down economist, the laissez-faire plutocrat, among a number of more or less likely possibilities, would have already converted it into a Lady's Rolex on the arm of some Westchester investment broker's wife — or, more probably, that of his NYU student mistress. Let us never forget to thank the United States taxpayer. And let us never do away with him or her. There is no more civilized and humane creature in the world.