What Social Contract?

Do the ends justify the means?

Should we finance health care and the arts by taxing cigarettes? Fund schools with lotteries and casinos? Where’s the sin in a few sin taxes?

With sin taxes, we tax the few in order to benefit everyone else. Convenient, since everyone else no longer expects to pay taxes – at least not higher taxes – to receive the benefits of organized, civilized society: good schools, basic services, fine arts.

Yes, ok, but we’re taxing the bad people, the sinners. Or – in preschool mom parlance – the people who make bad choices. If only those folks would make better, more holy choices – well, they could free themselves of the sin tax. Never mind what happens when everyone quits smoking and stops gambling. Just ignore the socio-economic angle to who smokes the most or buys the most lottery tickets. There will always be sinners, after all, and therefore always sins to tax. At least we never have to raise taxes, not the non-sinning kind, the kind on everyone.

When President Bush recently vetoed an expanded children’s health insurance program, only a few critics of the legislation focused on the proposal’s funding source - an increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes. That adds up to a feel-good something for nothing for non-smokers. The Cuyahoga County arts and culture initiative of 2006 was funded by a cigarette tax. It passed – why not? One of the campaign slogans assured voters, “If you don’t smoke, you won’t pay anything for Issue 18.” We want our arts and culture, but please let the people over there pay for it. The ones huddled in the cloud of smoke.

The Republicans and more than a few co-opted Democrats have drilled into the American people that tax money we pay to the government is still our money, even after we pay it, and we should all get a nice chunk of it back every now and then, preferably close to election time. Liberal is a bad name no one wants to be called. A politician who proposes raising taxes might as well start packing his boxes to go back to the farm.

Whatever happened to the notion of citizens contributing so that the government can ensure good schools, necessary health care, durable infrastructure, strong national defense, a healthy environment, a safe and adequate food supply? The idea that we should contribute to our government in order to reap its benefits is extinct. The social contract was dead in America by the end of the twentieth century.

Americans opting out of their democracy (why bother to vote?) isn’t just about taxes. We can say with certainty that there will never be another military draft. Why should everyone have to fight a war or even think about it or grieve about it, when we have other people to do it for us?

So here we are. As bridges fall, soldiers call home to their families for needed equipment their government fails to supply and return to combat zones for lengthy tours of duty, food contamination scares and toxic toys become commonplace, school levies fail, New Orleans is all but abandoned, children fall ill and families lose everything paying for health care – as all this surrounds us, politicians of all stripes promise to cut taxes so Americans can hold onto more of their money.

To be sure, raising taxes or re-instituting the draft would not alone solve our country’s problems. Far from it. But the idea that every citizen – not just the smokers or the enlisted soldiers – should be invested in our democracy, that there is a mutually beneficial and mutually obligatory social contract between the citizen and his government – must return. If it doesn’t, the future looks bleak indeed.