No-tax groups are not against taxes, only those for services they don’t like: those that help others than themselves.
I don’t like my taxes going for our troops being killed and maimed in useless, unwinnable wars. I don’t like supporting churches with my taxes. I don’t like supporting large airports I will never use, and air traffic systems that I don’t need. I don’t like supporting small airports from which I will never fly and social and veterans groups I will never join. I don’t like wasting my taxes for studies on so-called human-caused global warming.
I don’t like paying for the high pensions of government workers and their double- and triple-dipping. I don’t like paying for incarceration of marijuana users, growers and sellers, or prostitutes and johns, and many other things my taxes pay for.
But I am for the American dream: my taxes helping the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, the homeless and the tempest-tossed.
That is what the no-tax groups are really against. It is racism at its worst, cloaked in sheep’s clothing. But no matter how disguised, it is mean, it is ugly, it is divisive, and it is un-American.
This article appears in May 13-20, 2010.