We put a great deal of stock into responsibility: in our personal lives, in our duty to provide our readers with the best local coverage we can manage, and in our belief that elected officials must treat our tax dollars with the dignity and respect that our collective labor merits.

Taxes aren’t just a big pot of money that sits around waiting for somebody’s whims to spend it.

They are the blood, sweat and tears of those who contribute them. A tax dollar is a sweet treat unpurchased — fifty of them? That could be a new toy or game for your kid, a minor repair to your house or vehicle or a new piece of clothing.

Taken together, an account filled with our tax dollars may as well be filled with the unfulfilled desires and dreams of the taxpayers.

This is why many voters view fiscal responsibility in such high regard. If we can’t spend those dollars ourselves, then we want to make sure that we are seeing the benefits of them elsewhere, and that we have confidence that the results of our hard work are being managed correctly.

This all seems pretty common-sense, at least to us. But there are those who will struggle with it, so, we feel the need to spell it out.

It is through this lens that we regard with some confusion some of the decisions our elected officials are making.

Statewide, Pennsylvania taxpayers are spending over $1 billion per year on 14 cyber charter schools, according to reporting from Keystone Newsroom. A recent report by Pennsylvania’s Auditor General, Timothy DeFoor, examined five of these cyber charter schools. He found a number of dubious expenditures, including instances of taxpayer dollars being spent on “things like staff bonuses, gift cards, vehicle payments and fuel stipends. Additionally, Commonwealth Charter Academy spent $196 million to purchase and/or renovate 21 buildings, which to us seems a bit out of the ordinary for a public school that is based in online instruction,” DeFoor said in a release.

“I am now the third auditor general to look at this issue and the third to come to the same conclusion: the cyber charter funding formula needs to change to reflect what is actually being spent to educate students and set reasonable limits to the amount of money these schools can keep in reserve,” DeFoor also said.

Certainly, there are children who benefit from cyber charter schools — and we need to be inclusive of those students. However, we need our legislature to step up and manage this issue in a way that does not punish those students who attend traditional public schools by removing necessary funding — and, in turn, punish the taxpayers by forcing those districts to raise their taxes to make up for the missing funding.

On a bigger scale, consider that the Trump administration has been exploring cutting funding to the National Park System and the National Institute of Health’s research funds. A 2011 report found that for every $1 of investment into the National Park System, $4 of economic value was generated. The National Institute of Health is less profitable: it only returns $2.50 per $1 spent. That is still a crazy amount of profit for the American public when you consider that these budgets are — or at least were — in the billions of dollars.

We are talking purely about the dollars here. There are obviously other reasons to be in favor to maintaining and staffing our national parks and continuing to fund much of the medical research that has improved our general quality of life so dramatically over the last hundred-odd years.

But, purely fiscally, it doesn’t make sense to us why you would want to cut funding to programs that are actively returning 250-400% of their investment. If anything, we would expect those investments to increase and help fund other, less profitable areas.

To be fair, these are large sums of money — unfathomably so, the wider the net. If readers have never played around with the various web games that let you “spend” Bill Gates’ money, they are excellent tools to develop an understanding of just how bad we are as humans at understanding large numbers and we would recommend checking them out.

Our national budget is an absolutely unimaginable amount of money, and there are bound to be things in it that we don’t personally feel we benefit from — but, as long as we can be certain that someone is benefitting, that’s at least something.

We are, fundamentally, an individualistic society — being the land of independence and freedom will have that effect. But that doesn’t mean that we should completely disregard the needs of our neighbors.

Taxpayers need their elected officials to govern for the common good: make wise investments, maintain infrastructure and take preventative steps to head off future crises.

Fundamentally, we elect people to keep the bills paid, the lights on, and the roads as bump-free as anyone can manage to achieve in this part of the world. We would urge our legislators at both the state and federal levels to push for responsibility — which means not only inhibiting wasteful spending but also, and arguably more importantly, empowering spending which is actually worth it.

Good results deserve rewards.