New Year Resolutions, Taxes, and the Common Good

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

I do not make many New Year resolutions, but I am making one for 2018. In my lifetime, I have paid thousands and thousands of my hard-earned dollars in taxes. While doing do, I have felt emotions ranging from mild annoyance to outright aggravation, but never happiness. My resolution for 2018 is to pay my taxes more joyfully.

Why in the world would I ever want to do something like that? Catholic catechism indicates it is “the duty of citizens to contribute along with the civil authorities to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom.” According to the Church, submission “to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country.” In other words, by paying taxes we are taking “co-responsibility for the common good.”

What is this common good for which we are responsible? Common defense is one, generally consuming about one fifth of the federal budget. Federal taxes also pay to provide the means for senior sustenance and health care, as well as health care for the poor and children. Moreover, when I pay taxes, I am providing money for housing assistance, hunger programs, assistance of abused children, veterans programs, scientific/medical research, education, transportation, and infrastructure. I think a decent argument can be made that these all are part of the common good.

State and local taxes also cover a variety of things that are part of the common good. This includes education, economic incentives to business, roads, airports, transportation, public health and safety, consumer protection, municipal electric power, parks and recreation, wildlife preservation and management, the arts and humanities, courts and corrections, and public assistance. An old New Yorker cartoon does a wonderful job of illustrating this notion of the common good. The cartoon depicts a car which has stopped abruptly on a road that has suddenly dead-ended at a thick forest, literally at a wall of trees. A sign by the side of the road indicates: “Limited government next 600 miles.”

I take no issue with people who express legitimate concerns about wasteful spending or negligent stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Budget watchdogs play an important role in assuring that our common funds are spent wisely and carefully. I do worry, however, that sometimes in the debate over taxes, we lose sight of the reality that taxes are one of the primary ways we take co-responsibility for and build what the Church calls “the common good.” As a result, when I pay my taxes this year, I am going to remember the words United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1927, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”