Why Everyone Should Pay

For Public Education

To the Editor:

In a letter last week, Kathy Pinto says she’s been waiting to ask why people with no children, or those whose children have already been through school, have to pay school taxes. Well, I have been waiting to answer:

People who have no children benefit from public education anyway. Over 90 percent of the people who serve them –– firemen, policemen, doctors, nurses, dentists, lawyers, librarians, musicians, sales clerks, insurance agents, designers, builders, medical researchers, inventors, repairmen, congressmen, etc, ad infinitum –– were educated in the public schools. Since they profit from public education, it is only fair that they share the cost.

Second, people without children –– those who want their taxes reduced –– probably aren’t willing to forego their Social Security or disability payments. Social Security –– contrary to fairy tales –– does not involve the government saving your payments under Uncle Sam’s mattress and then giving them back to you. A retiree’s checks are not “his money” but come directly from the current tax-paying generation. My 17-year-old son will be spending the summer teaching sailing to save for college, and though he won’t even make enough to pay income tax, his Social Security tax, to the tune of 15 percent (including what his employer won’t pay him because the employer has to pay the government one half directly), kicks in from the first dollar earned and goes directly into the pocket of retirees.

Ah ha, you say: but those retirees already paid Social Security for other retirees, so now it’s their turn.

This argument falls apart because each year, there are fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees. In 1940 there were 42 workers per retiree; today there are only three; also, life expectancy has increased and people are having fewer children, putting a much, much greater burden on my children to support people who so deeply resent their existence. If anyone would like to stop paying the school portion of her taxes, I suggest she forego Social Security payments.

As for people whose children have already finished school: simplifying by doing everything in today’s dollars (if any previous year’s schooling costs were lower, the school taxes were proportionately lower as well), if someone had two kids go through 13 years of school each at an average $8,000 a year, their kids cost $208,000 to educate. If they pay an average of $6,000 a year in taxes, of which $3,000 are school taxes, then it would take 69 years to have paid for their children’s schooling (104 years if they had three children).

 Having said all that, I’d like to add that it is pitiful that I even have to make these perfectly obvious pragmatic arguments when there are far more important issues at stake. Educating the next generation is the right thing to do; we are one human family, and these are our children, whom we count on to take care of the earth, take care of each other, and continue our democracy. It would take another 500-word letter to explain “common good” and the virtue of civitas to people who would not understand the concepts anyway.

Mary Taylor

31 Jeremiah Road, Sandy Hook                                      May 5, 2003