Almanac: At the Capitol

Are taxes completely good, completely bad, or somewhere in between? If you listen to the radio ads and billboards being published around the state attacking DFL state legislators, you might think the first two were being espoused. Reality, however, is a bit different.

I personally had a tax-related crisis of conscience recently. Because I have multiple sources of income using different tax statuses, I met with a tax professional to help me sort things out. He showed me all the little nickel-and-dime deductions an individual like me can take to reduce the amount of tax I pay.

Given where I stood with the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Revenue, I was tempted. Really tempted. After all, who likes paying money if they don't have to? But I'm a Democrat, I believe in paying my fair share for services the entire community needs...

That's right. I'm a Democrat. I believe in paying my fair share for services the entire community needs.

So I took some reasonable deductions: rent paid, for example. A few regular business expenses. But I left out a few things too, including a pretty sizeable charitable donation, and I walked away feeling pretty good about writing two checks.

And then I thought about the only logical conclusion we can possibly come to if we continue with the logic of the Taxpayers' League and Governor Pawlenty's political-campaign-funded radio ads: "DFLers are bad, because taxes are bad. All government services are bad. There is no such thing as 'your fair share.' Poor people are just lazy, and there's no reason for the middle and upper classes to pay for services we don't use."

As much as my colleague in this space, David Strom, and his anti-tax band of merry men want the populace to believe it, DFLers aren't espousing the polar opposite of that brutal and reactionary mindset. Rather, the DFL majorities, put in place by a wide mandate, are correcting four (perhaps eight) years of poor fiscal policy, and putting Minnesota back on the track on which we should have stayed: a course on which everyone can pay their fair share for services that enrich the entire community, and on which we can all agree that while no one enjoys paying taxes, we are all better off for the contributions we make.