Exactly.
Don’t Buy the Lie: We Built It Together
WE JUST GOT back from a 10-day vacation in New Mexico and Colorado. It would not have been possible had my fellow citizens not paid taxes and provided good and safe roads, rest areas, clean water and sewage facilities, subsidized electricity, police protection, tax-subsidized gasoline prices, libraries, museums, traffic signs/maps, Internet service thanks to DARPA (U.S. Army), public transportation, clean air, U.S. Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, local, county and state governments, public power and much more.
The beautiful agricultural crops we saw are subsidized by taxpayers. My farm family relatives have benefited and still do. The fire-scarred forests were still worth seeing thanks to taxpayer-subsidized firefighters who stopped the burning. The skies were more beautiful thanks to taxpayer-subsidized clean air regulations. Thanks to President Eisenhower and Congress for the safe and beautiful interstate highways and the taxpayers who paid for them.
Indeed, even the lodging, restaurants and other retailers would not have been available had not taxpayers provided the infrastructure for them to thrive. We would not have come back loaded with antiques from merchants along the way had not my fellow citizens chipped in for the last 200-plus years to support an economy that provided me with old and new products along the way.
I could not have understood much of what I experienced if not for teachers and communications from media over my lifetime where I learned about my country. Taxpayer support for radio and TV came through the many public agencies that support the airwaves.
In other words, I did not alone provide for my vacation. Millions of my fellow citizens paid their share, and my wife and I are grateful. I am grateful to live in a tax-supported free country where others have lived and died to help me. Thank you!
Why should I condemn “government” and pretend I have pulled myself up by my own bootstraps when you paid for so much so that I could enjoy my retirement and travel.
ELMER JACKSON
Albuquerque
http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2012/09/04/opinion/talk-of-the-town-60.html