Paying taxes to Uncle Sam is your patriotic duty

In a post-9/11 world, we see them everywhere: “God Bless America” bumper stickers, flag lapel pins and countless other signs of patriotism for the greatest country on earth. We all sleep easier knowing that the police and fire department can be at our houses within eight minutes. Our extensive freeways are paved, our water is clean and our military is the best in the world. And how do we pay for all those nice things? Taxes. Evil, burdensome, socialistic taxes.
 We hate seeing the deductions in our already meek student paychecks and having to go through the hassle of tax season. But we forget what that money is going towards. We forget what pays for public education, our court system, street lighting and salaries that keep our cops happy enough not to be corrupt. In other words, our taxes pay to preserve America as a paradigm for the First World.
 Would I be making a valid argument by saying that paying taxes may just be the truest form of patriotism? Sounds a bit nationalistic, but that’s our whole shtick.
 I cannot seem to get a grasp on the whole Tea Party movement. These people are viciously enraged, screaming their heads off, demanding small government and few taxes, if any. They want the government to decrease spending, yet would pistol-whip anyone for even suggesting to cut a single cent from our robust military and national defense budget.
 A nation with a small government cannot operate the largest military machine in the world. It doesn’t work that way. We cannot afford massive aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, drones flying over Pakistan and latex gloves for the creepy TSA guy at the airport without taxes, much less a large government to run it all. Again, things just don’t work that way. We cannot afford to fix those potholes on Linda Vista Road, educate the 90 percent of American children who attend public schools or run the post office without taxes.
 As Americans, we have gotten used to living off our credit cards and spending what we don’t have on what we don’t need. This has affected the way we look at paying to keep living in a country people risk their lives to sneak into.
Who did this to us? That is easily answered. It’s the rich who actually pay most of the taxes for us.
 I recognize that the top one percentile of wealthy Americans pays for most of the revenue our nation sees, even when Bush’s tax cuts might have saved them almost $500 billion dollars over the past eight years. They have persuaded us to vote against our own financial interests. We don’t see Warren Buffett or Bill Gates marching on Washington, D.C. in the humid heat. We see middle-class Americans who don’t even make enough money to have to worry about being taxed too much. We see people who don’t want to pay taxes, but want unemployment benefits when their GM plant is shut down and subsidized meals for their children at school.
 The Tea Party is a collection of broke “Joe the Plumbers” rallied by Glenn Beck to promote the economic interests of the obscenely wealthy. The reality is that no person in the top tax bracket is going to fly their Gulfstream-5 jet to a Tea Party meeting at St. Mary’s School Hall in Escondido.
So, are these Tea Baggers unpatriotic? You bet your red, white and blue overweight kids they are. If people in the Tea Party movement are so worried about losing the America they grew up in and love so much, why would they not invest in its future by paying their share of taxes? Do they think all those loans President Bush took from Communist China to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to pay themselves? They scream “Taxation without Representation” after they learned to read and write that at their local public school. They want the American Dream, but don’t want to pay for it. That is called mooching and is usually frowned upon.
 Be a good American citizen. Quit complaining about being taxed and remember that since President Obama took office, chances are you are one of the approximately 90 percent of people whose taxes are going to be going down from this past year.