Americans for Tax Reform<\/em>. \u00a0People like Norquist, who are charlatans at heart and deeply unpatriotic and immoral, use the complexity in the tax code that they help to create to persuade Americans that taxes are bad. \u00a0This is also true in states all over the country, where it is the unpredictability of property tax burdens and not the amount that causes schools to go wanting for funding.<\/p>\nOur tax code is the DNA of our nation’s moral compass. \u00a0I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. \u00a0The old expression ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt for all sorts of situations. \u00a0People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it. \u00a0I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country. \u00a0The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all. \u00a0And that, more than anything, says something about how much they value this experiment called America<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
No, Matt Stoller; as Thomas Jefferson himself averred, keeping a lid on the size, power and appetite of government is fundamentally American and itself deeply patriotic; our founding fathers believed that government was not so much an enemy (let’s be realistic) as a animal that needed to be kept tame.<\/p>\n
But much more important for this “experiment called America” is the ability and willingness to accept that dissent and difference aren’t themselves base and evil.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not to do so is a form of moral retardation that is itself deeply antithetical to what this country is about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No matter how they undercut the military, no matter what loathing they pour upon America’s system and elected adminsitration and capitalist system and history, no matter what horrors they’ve coddled as they do so, it’s established that one dare not call any liberal “unpatriotic”, for fear of being called an ugly angry conservative. But apparently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,24,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-culture-war","category-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}