Apply Liberally

By Al Horn

A columnist in the local paper who has often served as a model for my writing recently let me down. I'm not sure it was entirely his fault.

Life is a series of changes. One day you learn to walk. The next day you are learning to use the bathroom on your own. A few years later you start school. Several years after that, you finish school. The changes don't stop there; they just become subtler.

As a young man coming out of high school I lamented at the limited funding I had for higher education. Participation in athletic programs left me little time for earning much less saving money for college. My parents didn't have enough money to send me despite the fact the government said they made too much money for me to qualify for any grants. The scholastic version of Catch-22. Not understanding the loan process, I entered the work force figuring I would never see the inside of a college. I also carried a resentment of the system that had excluded me.

I felt that higher education should have been available to anybody wanting to participate. I didn't care what it meant as a fiscal burden to society. My votes for politicians in the future would be for those who would help my children and their children get a good government paid education. Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!

Life... happens.

As I began to acquire real and personal property I noticed that everybody wants me to pay a little more every year to fund school, libraries, and fire districts. At first I don't have much problem with this. If it moves my agenda toward better education for my heirs forward, so be it. I also saw social needs that would require more financial sacrifice on my part. I publicly supported these programs and was labeled a liberal. Many times an adjective would precede the word liberal. I bore them in stride.

Life... continues.

It seems that more of my tax money is going to causes that I see no real return in terms of my agenda. In fact, the more I acquired in means of properties and entitlements, the more I want to hang on to my tax money to continue paying for my acquisitions. By the time I have reached my mid thirties I can see that the government isn't going to provide free or even cheap college education unless I am willing to pay a lot more in taxes. That would have been fine if they could guarantee that every dollar taken for schools would all go to schools and grant programs for children wanting to attend.

Government doesn't work that way.

For every dollar you contribute(?), the legislators choose how it is spent. More than half that dollar can go towards programs you are against or could care less about. In order to get enough money toward the cause you champion, you would have to pay half your income into taxes. There would still be no guarantees that some of the money you expected to go toward the program of your choice would instead go to some Senators pet project.

Suddenly... life changes again.

You find yourself in a political twilight zone. If you can't have a representative voice in where your tax money goes then you find you want to hold onto as much of it as possible. You want the government to keep your future secure while discovering traditions have become more important. You begin to resent changes that mess with your personal comfort zone. You try to hang onto everything you've got while trying to amass more in case of a future famine. You realize how precarious life for you and those around you has become.

You're not the liberal you were twenty years earlier. What was once a fuzzy picture of the future is starting to come more into focus. You still have the gumption to steal second base but wouldn't dream of trying to take third. You sprinted during the first half and now you want to conserve energy during the third quarter to insure you make it to the end of the fourth. You want the best for your children's future but you aren't sure how much you want to gamble with your own.

In today's world, can a middle-income person approaching fifty afford to be a liberal?