gracchusdixit

With summer well underway, several million American tourists will visiting Europe, more than a few for the first time.  Many will return in slack-jawed wonder, awed by the immaculate roads, the fast and efficient trains and trams, the sprawling parks, the vast public spaces, and the magnificent monuments and museums that adorn the great cities of the continent.  They will come home, asking themselves why we, who live in the richest country on earth, cannot achieve something similar?

Why are our roads and bridges crumbling?  Why are we condemned to waste hundreds of hours stuck in traffic on highways riddled with potholes?  Why are the few trains we have little more than slow, lumbering hulks that lurch their way along miles of decrepit and dangerous track?  Why are so many of our largest cities blighted by trash, mile upon mile of cheap strip malls, and sheer ugliness?

There are other, less obvious, questions that might be asked, about the wretched state of our social as well as our physical assets. Why, for example, does the United States of America have the most expensive healthcare system in the world but some of the worst health statistics?  Why does the quality of our educational system lag behind nearly every major European country, not to mention Asian dynamos like Singapore? Why do the Europeans, and particularly the Scandinavians, appear to be so much happier and satisfied by their lives?

These are complex and vexing questions, of course, and simplistic answers would be misleading.  Nonetheless, one of the principal answers is a subject that we Americans are reluctant to discuss.  That answer is taxation.

We are constantly told that we pay some of the highest taxes in the world, that our tax dollars are being wasted, that cutting taxes would unleash entrepreneurial energy and lead to an economic boom, that such a boom would not only provide greater prosperity for everyone but solve much of what seems to ail the country.

Right-wing ideologues have been spinning this fairly tale for at least 30 years.  Indeed, the major rationale for the disastrous health care proposal now on offer in the Senate is that tax cuts for the richest Americans will somehow unfetter the free market, improve healthcare, lower medical costs, and drive down insurance premiums.  How all this is supposed to work in the real world is never explained.  Rather, it is asserted as a self-evident truth.

Every time this fairy tale has been put into practice, however, it has proved to be hopelessly and disastrously wrong.  There is little historical evidence that lower taxes fuel economic growth, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the free market is capable of providing quality health care at an affordable price.  If that were the case, then such a system would now be at work somewhere in the world.  No such system exists.

Although Republicans are correct when they say that our three principal “entitlement” programs—Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security—may someday become unsustainable, the problem doesn’t lie with the programs themselves.  It lies with the shop-worn “solutions” Republicans invariably propose:  (1) cut benefits to “rein in spending”; (2) cut taxes to “boost the economy”; (3) privatize government programs to produce more “efficiency”.  The heretical thought never seems to occur to these ideologues that a simpler, far more “efficient” solution would simply be to raise taxes and generate more revenue.

The main reason our physical and social infrastructure is such bad shape is that, far from paying some of the highest taxes in the world, we pay some of the lowest.  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—OECD, for short—is a body of the 35 most advanced economies in the world, of which we are one.  The average tax burden in those countries—including all national, state, regional, and local taxes—is 36 percent of GDP.  The tax burden in the United States is 27 percent.  The only countries with lower tax burdens are Turkey, Chile, and Mexico, which scarcely qualify as models to be emulated.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, with a total tax burden of 50 percent, is Denmark.  Despite this “burden,” per capita wealth in Denmark is considerably higher than in the United States, that wealth is distributed more equitably, and in study after study, the egalitarian Danes declare themselves to be far more satisfied with the quality of their lives.

It is not my intention to suggest that a small, homogenous country of scarcely six million people at the northern edge of Europe can fairly be compared with a nation of more than three hundred million sprawling across an entire continent.   Denmark is not the United States of America.

But neither is the United States of America in any sense “normal”.   On the contrary, our fixation with cutting taxes at the expense of the most basic public investments is decidedly abnormal when compared with other advanced nations.  If we raised our taxes, not to the level of Denmark, but merely to the OCED average, we would produce an additional two trillion dollars a year:  enough to slash the national debt, balance the budget, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and secure the future of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We can continue to bemoan the fact that our crumbling infrastructure and inadequate public services resemble those of backward and underdeveloped nations, all the while we refuse to invest in them.   We can continue to lament the fact that we are financially underwater, all the while we refuse to pay down our deficits and debts.   We can continue to pretend that we are overtaxed, all the while we are woefully undertaxed.

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.  As long as we refuse to pay the price of living in a modern, decent society, we will get what we deserve.  Which is exactly nothing.