Taxes make government services available to all

April 15 is Tax Day, the deadline to file taxes on incomes earned.

Speaking for myself, I can't imagine a better time than now to thank my fellow Oregonians for making possible through these and other taxes, a wide range of services including the university where I teach.

The rationale for government provision of a wide range of services is varied as well. Sometimes the nature of the service requires a collective provision such as policing. One can imagine the complications if we expect people to privately pay for state troopers in order to ensure safety on the highways, and then travelled with their own posse.

In a different category of services like education, one of the goals is to ensure that children and youths are provided opportunities that might otherwise not be accessible to them for sheer lack of money. Of course, public support for higher education has decreased significantly over the last two decades, and this has made college education that much less affordable and accessible.

These, and many other compelling arguments for government, have resulted in a problem that we have come to understand very well over the past few years: a widening gap between what we would like the government to provide versus the funding available for all those services. Hence, the perpetual problem of budget deficit and the need to balance it all over again.

We ought to recognize that the budget deficits will not go away even as we slowly come out of this Great Recession, which we eventually will. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "budget pressures have not abated and, in fact, are increasing. Because unemployment rates remain high — and are projected to stay high well into next year — revenues are likely to remain at or near their current depressed levels. This is likely to cause a new round of cuts."

In Oregon, the near-consensus opinion is that we will experience a jobless economic recovery. It is quite possible that unemployment levels, currently at about 10.5 percent, may just about barely dip down into single-digits even by the end of this biennium. We can, therefore, expect the state budget issues to get complicated — even more than they already are. Thus, it is no surprise that the state's economist is projecting a deficit of $2.5 billion in the next biennial budget. All these mean that it will require Oregonians getting together to figure out what our spending priorities ought to be, not only at the state level, but at county and city governments too.

But it was disheartening to read that 37 percent of the 500 voters who were randomly polled recently did not even know that Oregon, like all the states, sends two senators to the Congress. Making tough choices during bad times requires our collective involvement through a basic understanding of, and involvement in, the civic processes of the state and country.

To that effect, here is a suggestion: Maybe "Tax Day" is a good opportunity to brush up on our civics knowledge, starting with a note of thanks to taxpayers.

Published in the Statesman Journal, April 9, 2010