“Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
Benjamin Franklin, letter written (in French) to his correspondent Jean-Baptiste Le Roy in 1789.
I have just finished paying the last of my taxes for this season.
My checks included the final payment for 2023 federal taxes, my first quarterly estimated federal tax payment for 2024 (those who are self-employed will understand), the first quarter of 2024 Washington State business & occupation tax (B&O), my Seattle annual business & occupation tax for 2023, the first half of King County residential real estate taxes for 2024, and the first half of the Seattle corporate property tax for 2024. Close on the heels of paying my tax obligations, I will have paid my CPA's bill for sorting all of this out in a way that will keep the spotlight focused on others and not on me.
April is the Cruelest Month.
These are the first few words of T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem, "The Waste Land."1
I am not a big fan of T. S. Eliot, nor even of his famous poem. I thought it was incredibly dull and incomprehensible the first time I plowed through it, and I still think so today. Poetry, like music, originally was intended to be a mnemonic device for remembering "history" and for passing on wisdom before there was writing. I have always thought that poetry, like music, should be pleasurable to hear and to perform, not a struggle.
T.S. Eliot was a member of the so-called "Bloomsbury Group," a clique of upper-middle class insiders that included authors, economists, philosophers, poets, academics and sundry "influencers" of the early 20th Century. These folks more or less "understood" what Eliot was talking about in his famous "Waste Land" poem. Ho hum. In my inerudite opinion, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were simply part of the waste.
The only words I remember from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" are the first ones... I thought that the line "April is the cruelest month" referred to paying taxes!
April is tax month in the United States.
I do not resent paying taxes. I don't enjoy it, either, but it's necessary. I don't really "enjoy" washing my socks, but I do it because it, too, is necessary.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in 1987 that "there's no such thing as society." She was wrong. There's no such thing as Margaret Thatcher.
Humans are social by nature and by evolution.
Taxes ought to be paid because humans, are social animals. We necessarily live within society. We are part of local and global commons, whether we like it or not. No matter how stridently anyone asserts his or her libertarian self-reliance, no one who enjoys any of the benefits of civilization - be they as basic as food, clothing, electricity, roads, ax blades, matches, nails, bicycle tires, poetry or music - can truly live outside the network of some type of human society.
We read stories now and then about the unexpected appearance of a cougar or a wolf or a bear where we least expect to meet them. When these encounters happen, we are reminded how necessarily socialized, and individually weak, people really are. One-on-one, without any manufactured defensive tools or a crowd of people to back us up, the encounter reminds us that we are, individually, just paltry bipedal apes who are no physical match for the stronger, faster, big-toothed and sharp-clawed predators of nature. For that matter, in the absence of a community, not one of us would long survive such commonplace and potentially terminal events as appendicitis, an infection, a snake bite, acts of banditry or even a broken leg.
Ergo, we pay taxes, as we should.
In many parts of the world, there is a direct correlation between the in-flow of tax revenue and the benevolence of the society from whom those taxes are collected. Unfortunately, in other parts of the world - and I am most familiar, of course, with the United States - the correlation between tax in-flow and social benevolence is, at best, attenuated.
In the United States, in particular, many folks at the top of the political-economic dunghill have the wherewithal to hire the means to substantially reduce their tax burden which, of course, shifts the tax burden to those who do not have that wherewithal. Anyone who reads this Substack page certainly fits within the latter group of "shiftees;" that is, those upon whom the "shift" has been shoveled.
More to the point, those who have the wherewithal to shift their tax burdens onto you also have the wherewithal to buy the political and electoral system that perpetuates the inequality.
It's a conundrum out of which we cannot "vote" ourselves. Those who own and parasitize everything also own and parasitize the politicians. There are parasites feeding on parasites feeding on parasites feeding on you and me. They employ (and therefore "own") the administrative and managerial class. Thus, directly or indirectly, they are also the selfsame guarantors of the integrity of the elections and the vote counting process which, as we hear sermonized, is the heart of "our democracy."
I cringe whenever I hear empty heads yammer about "our democracy" - they literally mean their democracy, not yours or mine. I also cringe whenever I hear public relations managers for large transnational corporations belch the insincere mantra that "safety is our top priority." Profit, not safety, is always their top priority, followed closely by avoiding responsibility and shifting liability to someone else (i.e., more "shift shoveling," as described above).
I similarly recoil when I hear pundits bemoan that there is too much dissent, too much noise, too many opinions, and we all need to "unify" around a single narrative. Like the palaver about "our democracy," it is always their version of the narrative around which they want us to rally, be it true or false, good or evil.
Those who own and parasitize everything own, directly or indirectly, all of us serfs who are tied to "jobs;" those who depend on work-related health care; those who are high-paid "professionals" working for, and captives of, the system (such as lawyers, doctors, judges, scientists, programmers, professors, accountants and engineers); and all of us whose easy domesticity have made us afraid of the dark. It is such a simple truth that it almost sounds juvenile: you cannot be independent or free if your survival depends on the good will of someone upon whom you are dependent.
And then there are the taxes.
I once prepared a rough comparison of the "obligations" owed by a medieval serf to his feudal lord and the taxes, fees and obligations that 21st Century serfs have to pay to the state. If anyone is interested, I can post that comparison at this site. Although the names have changed, many of the taxes, fees and obligations we pay today are quite similar to what our medieval analogs had to fork over. They are so similar as to make me wonder whether our "obligations" as "citizens" have appreciably changed from when our ancestors toiled as peasants on the feudal desmesne.
My complaint, however, is not the payment of taxes themselves. My complaint is what my taxes are used for and for whose benefit, such as might have been the lament of the medieval serf.
Our post-modern tax system is completely upside down.
General income taxes should be used to fund commonly useful and socially necessary activities. Instead, general tax revenue funds the unpopular and evil functions of our so-called "civilization." Then we are required to vote for local levies as supplemental taxes to pay for the necessities.
General taxes should fund a high-quality public system for fundamental and apolitical educational instruction from kindergarten through college or trade school.
General taxes should support a high-quality public health system for basic care - - not vanity procedures; not frenzied self-mutilation induced by unscrupulous exploitation of the insecure; not profit-farming by Big Pharma of the sick or aged.
General taxes should fund a retirement safety net that ensures reasonable security in old age, rather than mere warehousing of the decrepit and the institutional vampirism of their diminishing assets.
General taxes should fund a legal system that is simple, quick, affordable, understandable and fair, and that does not involve politicized courts or the intercession of high-priced lawyers.
General taxes should support the necessities of nutrition and shelter for those who do not free-load and who contribute to the commons. General taxes should support basic public infrastructure of not-for-profit systems of transportation, communication, knowledge sharing and the Internet.
General taxes should be used to fund a security network that provides protection and security (from which same security providers we should not ourselves need protection).
As a matter of basic principle, general taxes should not be used to fund non-defensive war. Our general taxes ought not be used, as they are, to foment civil wars and domestic unrest here and abroad. Our general taxes cannot be used, as they are, to subvert governments, to prop up despots, to fund mercenary armies, and to undermine economic competitors. Our general taxes must never be used, as they are, to train and support terrorist organizations, to blow up undersea gas pipelines, to build biowarfare laboratories, to surreptitiously harvest and archive data, to surveil our activities, and to operate extrajudicial dark prisons that the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada would have approved.
All of the wars since 1945 in which the United States, the EU and NATO have engaged have been offensive, not defensive.
The propaganda notwithstanding, since 1945, not a single armed conflict joined by the United States was sincerely motivated by a desire to curtail "weapons of mass destruction,” or to protect women, children, freedom of religion, democracy, reproductive rights, diversity, "western values," or any of the other "narratives" around which we are supposed to rally. The propaganda notwithstanding, every such conflict joined by the United States, since 1945 (and arguably well before then, too), was motivated by the pursuit of profit, economic gain, dominion and the expansion of empire.
Those who cheer-lead war, those who support imperial and colonial projects, should pay for it. And these cheer-leaders should be obliged, personally, to fight in the front lines of the crusades they harangue others to fight for them.
Wars should be paid for, not from general tax revenue, but from a specific war levy on wealth and property voted on annually. Once the plutocrats and parasites have to put their own money and their own lives where their mouths are, then the war-mongering will abate.
The current regimes of Ukraine and Israel are criminal. You who are paying attention (that is, those who are reading/watching outside the confines of the western coordinated media) know that Ukraine's and Israel's recent misdeeds are loathsome. These are terrorist states whose lawless actions reprise Nazi Germany. Just as the Ukraine and Israel are terrorist states, so, too, are the U.S., the EU and NATO because they support them. So, too, are we in the U.S. individually complicit when, without a peep of protest, we acquiesce, we comply, we stick our heads in the sand. Equally complicit are the peoples of the EU, the Commonwealth countries and the NATO states whose political leadership and news media appear to be as flaccid and morally bankrupt as ours in the United States.
The public "money" that the U.S. Congress sends to militarily "support" our so-called allies comes full circle back to the United States as subsidies for the military-industrial complex. What subsidizes the military war machine creates huge profits for those parasites who already own most of everything.
The money we give to Israel or to the Ukraine - whether as a fake "loan" that will never be repaid or as an outright "gift" - also lifts our own stock markets. Stock markets are amoral and simply reflect the "profit potential" whether its source is real or a charade, evil or beneficial. Through increased sales of weapons, our "gifts" to the weapons industries also boost "employment" (particularly in the weapons and technology sectors, but in all ancillary sectors, too). Although these are jobs of prostitution (albethey significantly less honorable), the "employment" created by military spending helps create the illusion of prosperity by boosting the meaningless metric of the Gross Domestic Product. That, in turn, gives the Federal Reserve Board leeway to fiddle with interest rates and to artificially pump the economy.
... all of which, in turn, helps to "win elections."
Our forced tax-payer contributions to the Ukraine and to Israel also come full circle back to the coffers of our politicians in the form of campaign contributions made, directly or indirectly, by those who receive or benefit from the U.S. aid.
It's a merry-go-round. However, this merry-go-round is not merry. It's mean.
There is nothing less viable, nothing less honorable than an economy propped up with profits from death and destruction.
The United States, for all the promise it held in Benjamin Franklin's day, has devolved into just another empire struggling to maintain its primacy.
Not individually, but collectively, as citizens and taxpayers, we have all made a deal with the devil.
It is a matter of death and taxes. The mean not-so-merry-go-round supports our economy, our predations, our illusions, and our way of life.
April is the cruelest month. It is that month when we pay our taxes, It is that month when we renew our Faustian bargain.
* * *
"Cruellest" was Mr. Eliot's original spelling.