Cheap Hurts

Imagine you have four children. You would of course, want to give them the best of everything. But suppose you couldn't afford to give all four of them the very best of everything.

Would you shower two of them with the the very best food; the best bedrooms complete with top of the line furnishings; the latest most expensive clothes and gadgets and toys and let the other two have scraps of food, sleep in the garage, and wear rags? Well, of course you wouldn't. No sane person would.

But some people in our country don't have enough to eat. Some wait in line for basic health care at free clinics when they are lucky enough to get in. Some don't have warm coats in the winter.

So much for the Family of Man. We teach our children to share toys with their friends and then somewhere along the line we forget. Or maybe we remember to share, but we continue to elect people who only hear that we want to pay less in taxes.

Well, that will work, too. We can pay less in taxes. But if we do, we'd better step up to the plate and fill it with good food. We'd better be willing to organize fair health care and housing and education and roads and water and bridges and. . . . .

I guess we'd have to set up a committee or something to organize it all. Let everybody have a say in who is going to be on the committee, and stuff like that. We could all just put in our fair share and. . oh, wait. . . don't we already have something like that? It just sounds so much better when we don't call it tax I guess.

But we can't keep going on as if someone else will pick up the tab. We've come to behave as if tax is a bad word. I think we need to stop allowing our elected representatives to act as if all we care about is having a lower tax. Show me someone who can cut waste and take care of the community and I'll vote for her!