Grover Norquist's Stupid-Ass Ice Cream Cone

I've been thinking about Grover Norquist's ice cream cone lately since his name has been coming up regarding the anti-tax pledge. If you haven't heard of it, you can just Google Norquist--most profiles of him mention that when he was a little kid, his dad would get him an ice cream cone, and then take bites out of it, labelling each bite after some kind of tax: "income tax", "sales tax". You get the idea.

So you have an impressionable youngster, and he's being given something nice, and then, imagine his dismay when that something nice is being nibbled away! Darn those taxes!

Which is all very well from the point of view of a kid of six or seven (and don't get me started on my opinion of his daddy....), but once a person is an adult, you realize that this is not a good analogy for what taxes are. See, Grover's purloined dairy treat just slid down his old man's throat, but the tax money that everyone pays goes to lots of things that people depend on, voted for, built up over time--and shouldn't be taken for granted.  Without that revenue, what do we get?

Police forces with bites taken out?  Fire companies with bites taken out? Social safety nets with bites taken out, that real people fall through? Health inspection agencies with bites taken out, so they are less effective at making sure your ice cream is safe before you eat it? The nation's infrastructure with actual bites taken out--bad roads and crumbling bridges? A country with bites taken out?

Our tax dollars support our government, which is made up of, by, and for us. We couldn't have licked Hitler or put a man on the moon without tax money.  Tax money built the Bomb, helped eradicate polio and got the Internet started.  Acting like taxes are evil is just...un-American to me.  Honestly--would Reagan have rather won the Cold War--or eaten a whole ice cream cone? 

I'll leave that for right-thinking patriots everywhere to decide.