I heard Sen. Dan Sullivan get up there and talk about why he wasn’t voting for the debt ceiling/spending compromise.
His premise was reasonable. To paraphrase: “These are dangerous times, and we need to spend more, not less, on the military.”
OK. As a prominent part of this argument, he proceeded to make it into a false binary choice. “Do we want to spend money on the military, or do we want to spend it on the IRS?” I thought to myself, “Man, doesn’t he understand that the IRS (taxes) is how we fund all government enterprises, including the military?” The statement seemed so nonsensical, and also an appropriate illustration of the disconnect between the pro-military, anti-government, anti-tax crowd.
It’s just irrational.
The government and how we govern ourselves is our nation.
And, like any human enterprise, if it’s not well-funded (in the case of basically all governments, everywhere, through all of time), then you don’t have a strong nation and a strong military. The disconnect and the irrationality of these belief systems drive me personally nuts, but more importantly, they are corrosive and toxic and undermine any kind of collective, unified, effective action through, yes, our government and our civic duty to fully support our (nation, state, city, church, anything done as a group) through individual, robust, collective, sometimes legally required, financial support. Through taxes — in this case, through the IRS. Basically, we all don’t like paying taxes, but it is how we financially get behind our nation.
— Hugh Wade
Anchorage
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