Downing

You’ve got to admire the Legislature for its imagination in finding
new ways to earn the wholehearted contempt of the people of
Arizona—and, to the extent to which they pay any attention to our
dopey little border state, the derision of people everywhere.

The introduction of a bill asking Arizonans to donate money to the
state’s coffers is the latest contempt-worthy maneuver. The apparent
goal of this devilishly clever move by Rep. Judy Burges (R-Skull
Valley) is to embarrass the Democrats, who keep annoying her by saying
that the people of Arizona would be willing to contribute more than
they do to keep the state solvent and functioning.

Her tactic is supposed to work because a) very few people will care
to chip in (“Excuse me? Give that bunch of chimps a dime?!”), and b)
the amount raised will be ludicrously small in comparison to the
deficit. Hence, another huge win for the GOP!

This is over-sophisticated. The people who look bad, who have looked
bad and who will continue to look bad are the mouth-breathing anti-tax
ideologues who got the state into this mess by refusing to levy
adequate taxes to fund the services and infrastructure we all need.

History teaches us, oh my children, that governments have found
taxation to be their only source of dependable funding. So unless the
Legislature can capture an Incan gold hoard or find some monasteries to
disestablish, it must raise taxes. (But wait! Maybe assembling
an army of conquest and marching on Las Vegas is their next plan. We
can hope.)

The state income tax—the fairest means of moving money out of
private hands and into the common purse (along with luxury and sin
taxes)—is simply too low. I say this because of my 30-year
experience as an Arizona taxpayer.

My husband and I have state income tax withheld from our paychecks.
Do we like that? Of course not—we’d prefer to have everything the
state provides for free—but as lucid, adult Homo sapiens,
we recognize that’s not possible. And, to tell the truth, we’re OK with
it, since the small percentage the state gets is hardly causing us to
go hungry.

But, holy cow, every year, the state gives us back about $2,000. And
we get this big old refund even in years when the federal government
keeps every penny it collected (and sometimes demands more,
which we are obliged to pay, or else go to prison. The “go to prison”
aspect is a really important part of extracting money from your
citizenry, because, honestly, people are never, ever going to cough up
if you give them a choice. I’m just making notes as I go along for our
Republican legislators, so that they can follow).

And every year, Ed and I are astounded. The state of Arizona doesn’t
want our money? Doesn’t need our money? Has no
conceivable use for that two grand? Apparently everything in
the state of Arizona has always been in such fabulous shape that, year
after year, after going to all the trouble of collecting lots of money
from us, all they can think to do is send a big chunk of it back.

Yet we do feel that we have been adequately taxed over the
years—by, for instance, having to put our children through
private schools because the public ones were, in our opinion, wholly
inadequate. (As people for whom the education thing has worked out
pretty well, we tend to think it’s important.) We know that however
financially painful this was for us, we were lucky to be able to do it;
lots of people, of course, can’t. Those people pay for low, low state
taxes with the ignorance and crappy job prospects of their
children.

We realize that we’re taxed in other ways, too. We pay every time a
kid who’s waiting on us is supposed to make change and can’t, and every
time a high-tech company thinking about relocating to Tucson goes
somewhere else after its employees get a look at our public schools. We
pay with every environmental degradation. And we pay a little every
time we’re humiliated by seeing Arizona at the bottom of another survey
of the 50 states.

Here is a universal and unalterable truth: You get what you pay for.
In Arizona, we’re getting it in spades.

This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.