Let Them Eat Tax Forms

By Barbara Ehrenreich

TAX TIME MAKES ONE NOSTALGIC FOR THE DAYS WHEN we had a government. I mean way back, before U.S. Senators started resigning to go in search of productive employment. I mean long ago, when citizens sent off their tax forms marked "sealed with a kiss," knowing Uncle Sam would use the money to right wrongs, build bridges and comfort the widows and orphans. But has anyone seen Uncle Sam recently? There is a rumor that the Nixon team took out the old gent two decades ago. They found him rattling around in a back office, raving about health care and housing and a few spanking-new pieces of infrastructure to plop down somewhere -- and they quietly sealed the door. It was a coup of sorts: the death of government and its replacement by the IRS.

Face it, there isn't much evidence of government anymore other than the IRS. Europe still has governments, or so we are told -- veritable busybodies of them, providing child care and free hospital care. We never expected all that here, just a few parades and space launches and water we could drink. But our space program is a galaxy-wide embarrassment. Our regulatory agencies are so feeble that factories burn down with the workers still in them and even the President has taken a hallucinogenic sleeping pill blithely approved by the FDA. Infrastructure is a thing of the past. As for the widows and orphans, they can be found massing around the Dumpsters, searching for viable crusts. Too bad 1040 forms aren't edible. Too bad we can't use them to patch up our bridges.

I speak from the middle-class, middle-aged point of view, of course: too young for Medicare, too old for Head Start, too rich for food stamps, too poor to be invited up to Kennebunkport for a spin on the President's powerboat. If we hate incumbents, it's because we no longer know what they're incumbing over. For most of us, government at the federal level is an increasingly mythical enterprise: a media show in which a bunch of fellows, possibly former stars of Rogaine commercials, are paid to bounce checks and spit at one another on TV. The only thing left that really works is the inexorable IRS.

There is the federal prison system, I grant you that: surely the vastest low-income housing program the world has ever seen, eating up $1.4 billion of federal spending. But the prisons can be regarded as a mere extension of the IRS: Who would pay their taxes if the alternative were not the sadistic embrace of the federal pen? Some of our more disillusioned citizens, the kind who keep talk-radio buzzing, have already concluded that what we have going here is a giant extortion system: Send us money, the IRS demands every April, or be prepared to spend a lengthy sabbatical locked up with a serial killer who has devoted the past 10 years to working out.

All right, there was the gulf war, surely a spectacular display of government-in-action, offering days of suspenseful viewing. But the war may have been little more than a public relations effort on the part of the IRS. Think about it: 20% of federal spending goes to defense, for which a more appropriate term is protection. No protection racket has ever worked without some kind of a credible threat. Isn't it true that as soon as Saddam Hussein was beaten back and the U.S.S.R. became the pitifully hungry C.I.S., the Pentagon produced a new list of international bullies?

We all know the excuse for the absence of government. The reason why nothing seems to come out no matter how much we pour in is widely known to be the federal debt. Thirty percent of our tax dollars go to pay off not the debt itself but the interest on the debt. This amounts to $200 billion a year, hardly any of which will ever fill an orphan's tummy or dry a poor widow's tear. Instead, most of it flows directly to a handful of institutions and relatively well-heeled folks who were clever enough to lend the government money at profitable rates. To these fortunate individuals (nearly 15% of whom are not even American citizens), there is indeed a U.S. government, or at least someone who disburses those dividend checks.

And we must take some of the blame ourselves, we ordinary, middle-level citizens. For years we voted for men who promised to battle Big Government, also known as a "cancer," un-American and inimical to Our Way of Life. And they did, these brave men, these Reagans and Bushes: they cut and they trimmed. They deregulated. They privatized. They hacked at entitlements and skirmished with "waste" . . . Until nothing was left but the IRS.

So I say to Washington, prove me wrong! Show that our taxes serve some nobler function than to perpetuate the IRS. I can think of two convincing approaches. One would be to use the 20% of the budget earmarked for defense to cancel the 30% of tax dollars that are earmarked for interest on the federal debt. I am talking about a global strike against the people to whom we owe the debt: Bomb 'em, strafe 'em, plow them under with tanks! If we could fight for oil, or whatever it was, we could surely fire a few rounds to lower the debt.

The alternative, if that sounds too nasty, is to disinter dear Uncle Sam. I can just see that eccentric old geezer striding out into the daylight again, rolling up his sleeves and getting down to work -- feeding the hungry, healing the sick, scrubbing the environment, giving us an infrastructure that isn't made out of balsa wood and rubber cement. So free Uncle Sam and take my money! I wouldn't mind paying taxes -- to a government.