"That’s the kind of balance you need. Why is that the case? Because if you don't try to generate more revenues through tax reform, if you don't ask, you know, the most fortunate Americans to bear a slightly larger burden of the privilege of being an American, then you have to.....the only way to achieve fiscal sustainability is through unacceptably deep cuts in benefits for middle class seniors, or unacceptably deep cuts in national security.
----White House Finance Expert Timmy Geithner
Yes, even though Mr Goodman (your junior high history teacher), Mr Brown (your high school history and civics teacher), and Professor Carlise (that government studies professor in college) never mentioned any real burdens to being an American citizen.....there are apparently burdens.
I sat and paused over this. A moment of pondering. The "more fortunate Americans"? I grew up with folks in Bama, who still live in the same rural environment and make $25k a year. Frankly, they aren't exactly unhappy or in any discomfort. They do an occasional Saturday job for $300 under the table, help some neighbor paint their barn in exchange for 200 lbs of frozen beef steaks, and sit on the front porch discussing the Baptist revival from last week.
If you went up to this guy, and said he was the lesser and more unfortunate American.....he would look at you for a minute and question if you'd been drinking or smoking some good weed. He'd admit he wasn't making that much, but frankly.....he didn't care much for some government guy handing out free coupons, free gifts, free stimulus funding, or funding some solar company in the richest neighborhoods of southern California.
The misled logic with "more fortunate Americans"? After you've come to them for two years and grinned as you talked about the extra ten percent they needed to pay.....you'd eventually reach a point with a zero-growth economy and no solution yet to the home crisis, and start talking about the next version of the "more fortunate Americans". You'd lay out the next ten percent growth in taxes and remind everyone of what it takes to be a good American....more burden.
Two or three years would pass, and your friends would arrive at the door and talk about a stalled economy, and you had to take up the slack.....as the "more fortunate American", and own up to more burden....another ten percent. They'd grin as they suggest this.
Eventually, you'd greet them at the door and then suggest that as you opened it and they were trying to explain the "more fortunate American" deal and the burden issue.....that you were now a burden issue for them. Your fortunate status had turned unfortunate. Their grin would slip away.
They'd be looking at each other and trying to think of who the next "more fortunate American" would be, and how his burden would translate into something.
We almost need some special class to attend.....showing us how our lives have been shaped by our burdens. I'd like to think that I had just really small burdens.....but for some reason, I suspect others may be worried about me, and want to talk over my burden status. You can imagine this scene at a BP station out in a rural piece of Texas....where five guys discuss their burden status at length, and each saying the other folks have a bigger burden than themselves. Eventually, you'd get some burden score from the IRS, and then go into a fit when your burden measured slightly more than your neighbors.
Man, this burden business......is a big burden.
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