Short answer: Yes.
Nuanced answer: It’s certainly a civic-minded act, and while we may individually object to some things taxes go for or grumble about how much we individually pay, it’s one of the most direct ways that we support our country as a whole.
Answer worth writing a blog entry about: FactCheck just raked the Palin/McCain campaign over the coals for their misleading and obnoxious ad over this question, and Joe Biden’s assertion that paying taxes is, in fact, patriotic:
As the FactCheck article notes, the commericial as a whole, after you get past the basic that Joe Biden did, in particular case, suggest that paying taxes was patriotic. But that didn’t have anything to do with seniors, electrical bills, or even raising taxes as a whole. On Good Morning America last week, talking about campaign tax plans for the future:
Snow: Anyone making more than $250,000 is going to pay more?
Biden: You got it, it’s time to be patriotic, Kate. Time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut. And the way to do that is … they’re still gonna pay less taxes than they paid under Reagan.
Sorry, no sad-faced impoverished seniors with their social security checks involved in the above sentence.
That said — the topic is ludicrous because There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Or, put another way …
Is it patriotic to support our military?
Is it patriotic to support our national parks?
Is it patriotic to build and maintain highways?
Is it patriotic to help out that poor, sad elderly woman in the ad?
Is it patriotic to defend against terrorism?
Is it patriotic to fight drug smuggling and other crimes?
Is it patriotic to help support public financing of presidential campaigns? (coughMcCaincough)
Those things don’t just happen because someone waves a wand and makes money appear (unless you’re Henry Paulson). They only happen because we pay taxes.
Now, does each of us know of things our tax dollars go to that we object to politically, financially, aesthetically, or from some other reason? Sure. Does each of us grumble over the taxes we end up paying? Of course. But that’s part of the political process, and why we elect people in the first place. We can argue over the overall level of taxes, we can argue over who should shoulder most of the burden of them, we can argue over what they should go toward — but nobody in the political system, especially not John McCain or Sarah Palin, or George Bush for that matter, will stand up there and tell you that we shouldn’t be paying any taxes, or that paying taxes is unpatriotic, or that no real American would do it. Nobody’s gotten that far from their high school civics class.
What is patriotic is standing together in support of our country and its ideals. It means, also, shouldering our fair burden of that effort. To those with much, much is asked. Jury duty is patriotic, too — and it’s not patriotic for me to duck out of jury duty and let someone else do the job, any more than it’s patriotic for me to duck out of paying my fair share of taxes to keep the country running, to help its people and its defense and its infrastructure and its resources.
So on the one hand we have Joe Biden saying that its patriotic for folks who make over $250K/year to pay more of their share into the national effort. On the other hand we have the Palin/McCain campaign saying, essentially, that asking people to pay their share into the national effort is evil and manipulative and laughable and not patriotic.
Who’s the real patriot here?
On cue, the local afternoon righty station was all over this last week saying all the same things as in the ad.
“Taxes are the price of a civilised society”
That may not be an exact quote, but I am having trouble finding it on the ‘net because when you google you tend to get the other quote by the same gentleman- you know, the one about death and taxes.