America has a tax problem.

Well, several.

But there’s a particularly big one.

Have you read the column by Georgia Garvey directly to the right? Or, for those reading online, it is also publishing on Saturday, July 29, and the headline for it is “Drinking hemlock, eating in the shade and following dumb rules.”

If you haven’t, we recommend it — it directly pertains to this Our View. We’ll wait.

Welcome back! Assuming you went and read that, anyway. If you’re just still here because you already read it, awesome. We’ll keep going on.

We see Garvey’s opinion about rules as being similar to many peoples’ opinions about taxes.

Few people actually *want* to pay taxes. It’s not fun, and we would rather keep that money for ourselves, to spend on ice cream.

Without taxes, though, nobody has roads to get to the store to buy that ice cream, or police officers to keep us safe from people who would steal our ice cream.

That’s fair enough: those are things that directly affect us.

Where things get a bit more grey is when we aren’t obviously benefitting from our hard-earned tax dollars.

We don’t mind paying taxes when they’re going to something that we can see the impact of. This is one of the issues with the ending of CDBG funding — it was one of the very few ways that we actually physically see any benefit from our federal tax dollars.

Thankfully, we still have one of the others: funds for the military, where many of our community’s young go to serve our country while also securing benefits for themselves like college funding and VA healthcare.

Regardless, when our taxes are going, sight-unseen, to be shuffled around to pay for someone else’s shiny new municipal building a half dozen counties away, as a theoretical — this is not a specific dagger with an example in mind…if it was, we would directly reference it –well, that is far more unpopular.

There exist a lot of people who would prefer to spend as little on taxes as possible — to keep their hard-earned money to themselves, and not trust government entities to disperse it to where it needs to go.

After all, who’s to say that government’s wants are aligned with our own desires? They might — and, historically speaking — probably will waste our taxes on something we deem foolish.

Ultimately, this is the trap of our American individualism. We are, all of us, little kingdoms unto ourselves. We have our houses or apartments, our vehicles and infrastructure like cell phones and the like. We have our wardrobes to manage, our healthcare, utilities and a million other things that demand our attention — and dollars.

That leaves very little time, money or, all too often, care for our neighbor — and especially for our neighbor across town that we’ve never actually met. For a stranger.

Why would we choose a stranger’s needs over new kitchen countertops when ours are peeling and in dire need of replacement?

If that sounds like an accusation of selfishness, we would like to take a moment to assure you that it isn’t.

In fact, we are saying that it makes perfect sense.

When you have a society built entirely upon managing our own individual needs and desires, it inherently makes spending resources on others a fool’s errand.

Consider the many senior citizens in our area that live on a fixed income. Does it make sense for them to have to shell out an ever-increasing amount of that fixed income to support the school administrator that makes a six figure income?

No, it makes sense for them to keep their lights on, their thermostat set comfortably, food in their bellies and a Word Search in their hands.

As Garvey writes of rules, however: “But I do all of those things, and more, because there are certain freedoms that you give up when you live in a society, and one of those is the freedom to ignore any rule you find personally objectionable.”

If we want to live in a community, in a society, we have to expand our horizons and accept that the needs of the other are in fact needs of our own.

Charity is a magnificent thing — doing something purely for the good of doing it is one of the holiest things we can do. But we cannot run a society based solely upon thoughts, prayers and the whims of those with more resources than us — hoping that those whims will see fit to feed the Joneses this week or pave our pock-marked street.

In our individualized society, those whims will never keep up.

And so, taxes.

We may not agree with funding troops in the Middle East, or funding universities to do research or making sure that every kid has a meal at school.

But that is the system. Those are the rules.

And, as Garvey writes again: “‘love it, leave it or change it,’ if we agree that ‘ignore it’ isn’t an option.”

Many of us can agree, regardless of our opinions or beliefs, that our tax dollars do not go where we would wish them to go.

That needs corrected.

It is not reasonable to continue for municipalities, school districts, states and the federal government to drain the taxpayer dry in exchange for vanities that benefit no one.

If taxes need paid — and we would stand by that they do — those dollars need to go back to helping the common good, instead of the more typical result: feeling like we are being robbed.