You may have heard me in the past mention that in the Darwinian jungle that is highway driving in Ohio, I am the King of the Beasts, the undisputed apex predator, and that the left lane in this state is mine, by right of conquest.

It’s the Roundabout of Life

However, even the king can get in an occasional scrape, especially in a light, sporty two-seater, skittish as a dried leaf in a windstorm, which makes leeway so bad that, by comparison, Tokyo Drift is as slow as continental drift. All of which is by way of saying, years ago, I once totaled a car in a flat spin during rush hour. The car had been bought for daMrs by her ex, and it had been trying to kill me for years. But I survived completely unscathed each time, until Christine Jr. died a convenient death by guardrail.

There were many unfortunate legal and economic consequences, but “heavy lies the head,” eh? One which I believed was completely unfair, however, was that they sent me a bill for the guardrail.

Flash back to the 1900s: one of the ways that the GOP took over the last part of last century, leading eventually and inevitably to President Dunning J. Kruger, was with the whole tax revolution idea. Trickle-down Reaganomics, the Laffer Curve, pay the “job-creaters” – all that voodoo economics gave Grover Norquist his chance, and he ran around signing every Republican onto his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” that they would cut, cut and cut some more, until suddenly unchained corporations would lavish their newly-boosted bottom lines on their long-suffering employees, whose higher salaries taxed at lower rates would replenish governments’ coffers in a never-ending spiral of prosperity.

Everyone can make it to the top!

But…

We live in a system where the right to profit trumps all others. The chimerical view of the enlightened oligarch sharing his wealth in a glorious trickle, rather than, say, moving it off-shore where even the anemic US tax laws can’t reach him… well, let’s just say that particular Utopia has yet to emerge.

The net effect has been to slowly starve government to the point where it can barely function anymore.

Beginning in the 90s, municipalities, counties and states had to go through a metamorphosis. With tax revenues cut WAY back by disingenuous – or just plain stupid – Republican office-holders and credulous – or just plain stupid – voters, our civil servants had to get smart about how they raised operating capital.

This is why a simple traffic ticket can cost hundreds of dollars. This is why, to fix our mismanaged roads, Governor Flying Monkey of Ohio just passed a 10-cent-a-gallon gas tax and will charge me an extra $100 a year for plates because my hybrid (who loves me, not like Christine, Jr) won’t use enough gas. This is why 40,000 bridges are just waiting for a full load and a stiff breeze to collapse suddenly, but not unexpectedly. This is why the guardrail people send a letter not saying “Glad you survived,” but rather “Here’s what you owe us.”

Mike DeWine says “Pay me or the dog gets it!”

My immediate response was “Didn’t I pay for that guardrail already, once, and for those roads and bridges? And won’t I pay for it, again, with my taxes?” And the answer is, not so much. Not anymore.

The justice system, especially, has felt the crunch. It costs a lot of money to administer the law in a country built on the rule of law. But now we have over-crowded for-profit prisons, exorbitant fees, costs and judgments, underpaid, overworked pro bono attorneys, and no hope at all that things will get better.

The school districts, too, have felt it. Instead of a guaranteed, steady stream of income that allows them to safely and effectively care for and teach our children, administrations have to make one dollar do the work of three, and won’t go to referendum for additional money until the buildings are almost literally falling down around their ears, and then they still might not win it on election day. So we have “temporary” trailer classrooms. Teachers buying their own supplies.  No nurses. Inadequate heating or A/C.  Nutrition programs: cut. Fine arts education: cut. Sports: cut. No wonder kids cut school: everyone else has!

School’s Out For Ever

The costs for all of these things used to be a shared burden in society, with everyone paying into the funds for the common good. But now,  the user-fees and penalties assessed to pay for society are falling unequally onto the poor.  The disingenuous, credulous and stupid will say “Well, the speeding ticket costs the same for everybody.  That’s fair!”

But it doesn’t! It’s not! Yes, the new car payment and the higher insurance and the ticket and the guardrail set me back a bit. Yes, I’m still suffering the economic effects years later. But I’m doing okay. For somebody who makes tens of thousands of dollars a year less than I do (and yet is still laughably considered above the “poverty line”) all these fees and penalties have a much greater impact on their lives, to the point where they end up jailed, or evicted, or both, or worse.

Conversely, for the rich, for people making tens of thousands of dollars MORE than me, they can afford to avail themselves of attorneys, and actually get punished less than I do. Their wealth trickles back into society even SLOWER than it used to.  The negative effects of no longer having a shared burden don’t accrue to the people who have all the funds they need to deal with life’s little vicissitudes.  Something that can destroy a poor family is just minor blip on their balance sheet.

Oligarchs can buy highway guardrails all day long, but the guardrails that protect society as a whole from plunging into the third-world wealth-inequality abyss are gone. They can drop an extra 10 cents per gallon of gas without even noticing, but the fuel that powers our economy is sitting in off-shore accounts. They can buy lawyers to protect their ill-gotten gains from now until Doomsday, and then buy the private enclaves, islands and armies to let them ride Doomsday out.

Looking for any excuse to shoot….

America is a for-profit, pay-to-play society. And We the People can’t afford it.