Tax Cuts
Melanie is a statistic, a single mom hit hard by the economic downturn. In her previous life, she was a real estate appraiser for a bank, married, and confident of being able to provide a secure future for her children.In her current life, Melanie is a casualty of the housing bust, laid off by the bank when there weren't enough sales to keep a full-time appraiser busy. She and her husband did not weather the economic downturn well, and they divorced. Melanie knows she cannot get a job in the housing market, and is looking to do anything: clean hotel rooms, cashier at a grocery store, cook at a diner. She gets offers, but only for weekend and night shifts. She can't take them. There is no weekend and night care for young children (she has a 3-year-old and a seven-year-old).
Melanie looks for work every day, but her life is increasingly bleak. Unable to make $350 in child support stretch to pay rent, groceries, and utilities, she falls further and further behind. Yesterday she and her children were evicted onto the streets. She lost her car months ago, a huge loss in sprawling Florida where urban planners never heard of public transit. I'm sure it is a great comfort to Melanie to know that people who own vacation homes will be saving a couple of hundred dollars a year on property tax.
In my previous life, government was designed to help people recover from hard knocks. When I was in junior high and high school, Lyndon Johnson was pushing through a series of government initiatives called the "Great Society." He was not trying to immunize the nation against job loss and economic catastrophe, but he was trying to give people some breathing room and the tools to recraft their lives.
In my current life, Republicans have been unraveling the social safety net for the poor and middle class as rapidly as humanly possible. There is no pity or concern for young families like Melanie's contained in "compassionate conservatism." Our president greeted news that a single mom worked three jobs to maintain a bare living for her children with pleasure. "That's great," he beamed. "Only in America."
Yes, indeed. In all the developed nations, only in America is it required that parents work two to three jobs each to pay for basic necessities. Given the fall in regular incomes, even married couples often work three to four jobs between the two of them to keep from falling into abject poverty.
So what, my Republican friends ask, are we supposed to do for the Melanies of the world, and their children?
For starters, we could help with child care expenses. Our area has a subsidized child care program, but it is starved for cash, having been flat-funded for at least a decade, while costs have escalated, state mandates for services have increased, and the number of eligible children has shot up. The waiting list now numbers over a thousand children. There are no slots funded for night and weekend care, so families looking for help there aren't even on the waiting list. Now that the state has been in Republican hands for nine years, and the tax base has been shredded so that millionaires can buy multiple tax-exempt yachts, the situation is a great deal more bleak.
Not content with decimating the state tax base, the legislature successfully promoted the passage of Amendment 1 extending tax breaks to persons owning vacation homes and condos for rent, thus shoving municipal and county governments into serious revenue shortfalls. Some local governments, which have provided most of the match funding required to access state child care dollars, have said this year that no funds will be available. Other governmental units are warning of severe cuts. Without match dollars, the local child care service agency cannot access even the reduced state and federal child care dollars.
This may not seem like a tragedy to those without children or who pay full fees for child care, but this will affect them also. Parents like Melanie cannot make enough money to pay $150 per week per infant, or $100 per week per toddler, the going private fee rates. Without child care, she cannot work, pay taxes, or feed her children. The cost to society is eventually far greater than it would have been to offer a break on child care.
There are multiple other forms of assistance Melanie needs in order to re-enter society as a productive, self-sufficient woman able to care for her children on her own. She has no access to health or dental care for herself (and she really needs dental care if she is to land a job that pays a living wage), her application for housing vouchers will take months to approve in a best-case scenario, and, in an ironic catch-22, she can only qualify for job re-training once she has a full-time job.
There are basic services which support our entire population: education; fire-fighters; law enforcement; pollution abatement and prevention; road and highway maintenance; regulation of drivers' licenses. If we want our cashiers able to count out the correct change, or our air to be clean enough to breathe without causing asthma, we need to fund these things.
But we have chosen either to eliminate or sharply reduce our funding for even the most critical government functions, all as part of our worship on the holy altar of tax cuts. Never mind that virtually all tax cuts only affect the top one percent of the population. We don't think about that. We just hear the words "tax cut" and our brains freeze. And when we don't get any tax relief from the tax cuts aimed at others who are nothing like ourselves, we don't clamor for tax redistribution. We just clamor for more tax cuts in general, without seeming to care who they help or don't help.
When I discussed this issue with a local legislator, his response was a shrug. He honestly believes that if government was eliminated entirely, and we paid no taxes at all, then the "magic arm of the free market" would rush in to fill all gaps. The child care agency would not need to seek government funds, since our generous population would rush to fill its coffers. My homeless agency, which gets $15,000 a year to perform a two-page list of government mandated functions, would find a huge increase in private gifts, ample to meet the needs of all "deserving" homeless individuals and families, once people had more discretionary income. Private firms would build and maintain all the roads, supporting themselves with charging fees for people to drive on them. It is obvious that it isn't just the White House that has become detached from the reality-based community.
A friend of my mother's was shaking her head in bewilderment at the overwhelming passage of Amendment 1. "I wonder," she said, "if they will be so thrilled at saving $150 dollars a year when their houses burn down and there is no one to put out the flames."
We are in a recession. The house is burning down, and the water is turned off. May God bless us all.
posted by Lenore Wilson @ 4:51 AM
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