“Dadgum government! What do I owe them? So I skimped a little on my taxes over the years. What of it? They’d just waste it! And what they didn’t waste themselves, they’d go spend on a bunch of people who’d go waste it even worse. Handouts, always handouts! There’s always more for the unproductive. And it’s just my luck, the one thing they do efficiently is come after me! Me, a self-made citizen! I never asked for a thing. Everything I made, I made myself. My mistake was giving them anything. I wish I’d never paid a dime in taxes!”

“How’s that again?”

“Wh-wh-who are you?”

“Name’s Clarence. Now what were you saying?”

“I said I wish there was no such thing as taxes!”

“Hmmm. Gabriel, what do you say? Yes…yes…My thought exactly. Okay, George. Done!”

“Wha-what?”

“You got your wish. No taxes. Every penny you ever made is in your pocket.”

“Yeah, tell that to the IRS.”

“What IRS? There is no IRS!”

“Wha-wh-wh-what is this? Y-y-y-you’re screwy, that’s what I think!”

“Oh, yes, yes. Screwy. I’m plenty screwy. You’re going to find lots of things screwy, I suspect. Oh. Look above you, George.”

“What, what?”

“I said look above you.”

“What? There’s nothing there.”

“Exactly!”

“He… the bridge! Where’s the bridge? There’s a bridge up there! A big, beautiful six-lane bridge, the Veterans’ Memorial Bridge! I was there at the dedication with my father when I was a boy!”

“That bridge collapsed, George. 2031. Terrible thing it was. Seventeen people died. Four children.”

“Collapsed? Wh-what’re you talking about? I drove across it twice Tuesday!”

“There wasn’t any money in the Highway Trust Fund to maintain it. Fell into disrepair. Then one day… boom. Wasn’t any money to rebuild. Highway’s been closed ever since.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Yes. A lot of people thought so.”

“I don’t know what’s goin’ on here.”

“No, no. I’m quite sure you don’t.”

“And hey, wh-what’s that sign there, what’s that sign, by the river? Says—says no fishing, no swimming! That’s a lie! I fish here most Sundays! Bring my grandkids down for a swim, too!”

“Oh, no, you don’t, George. Hasn’t been fishing or swimming in this river for a good long time.”

“Whaddya mean, that river’s as clean as—”

“It was, George. It was. But it hasn’t been for years, accounta that pharmaceutical factory upriver. And there wasn’t any money to clean it up.”

“Bahhhh…You’re, you’re playin’ games with me. C’mon, let’s go, let’s go downtown.”

“Very well, let’s go.”

“Hey, what—what’s that? What’s going on here?”

“What do you mean?”

“That land there, that bulldozed land. That’s where the college is! What are you tryin’ to do to me?”

“There’s no college there anymore, George. It closed.”

“Whaddya mean it closed? Colleges don’t just close!”

“Oh, sometimes they do, George. A lot of them have, in fact. No money.”

“Well, at least the hospital’s still there!”

“Oh, yes, it’s there, but it’s about half the hospital you knew. No cancer ward, no dialysis treatments, no long-term elderly care, no—"

“Hey! Wait a second! What’s that sign? ‘Welcome to Norquistville’? This is Medford Falls! What’s Norquistville? Who’s Norquist?”

“Oh, he’s a man, it’s not important. But there are a lot of Norquistvilles these days. Keep driving.”

“Driving? We’re sitting in a parking lot. Where the heck did all this traffic come from, Medford Falls never had this kind of traffic!”

“Well, once the highway closed—”

“Yeah, yeah, the highway, right, the highway. Hey, I know! Let’s ditch this car and take the light rail.”

“George, there’s no light rail!”

“Whaddya mean no light rail? That light rail system was the pride of this town!”

“Yes. It was.”

“Everybody loved the way it went right inside the civic center!”

“Yes, everybody did. But there’s no light rail, George, and there’s no civic center for the light rail line to go into.”

“You’re, you’re…you’re makin’ me see things…Hey! That—that’s the library! It’s—it’s boarded up! They boarded up the library?”

“That’s right, George. Three years ago. Private money kept it going for a good long while. A library is a source of town pride, after all. Good to know that’s still true. But it was losing around $2 million a year. After a while, no one wanted to cover it.”

“Baahhh…Hey! That building! That’s Tom Kirkendall’s business! Now you can’t tell me that’s gone under! Tom’s a private businessman! We’re in the Rotary Club together, he’s the sergeant at arms! And I do a lot of business with Tom!”

“Tom ran a private business, George, yes. But close to half his business was contracts with the federal government. Department of Energy, mostly. There hasn’t been a Department of Energy since 2027. And your business hasn’t done business with his since then.”

“So how’s he—”

“Oh, he’s…okay. His son owns a chain of fast food places. They’ve—what’s the word?—proliferated, I believe. The son’s doing fine. Tom lives with him now. Gets by. If I must tell you, though: Leans a little hard on the bottle, poor man.”

“Tom?! Well…he should…get help!”

“Tch. You’re not getting this, George, are you?”

“Hey, wait a second, that’s the senior center! My mother loves that senior center! She goes there every Thursday, plays canasta with Mrs. Everly!”

“Yes, George, that was the senior center. Closed years ago.”

“Whaddya mean it clo—he-ey…how’s my mother? WHERE’S MY MOTHER?”

“Oh, she’s…she’s…”

“She’s what? WHAT???”

“Well…she’s alive. I can tell you that, George. She’s alive.”

“But she’s okay? She’s OKAY??!”

“Well, George, she is 87, you know. And she was costing, oh, let’s see, I’m rather bad with numbers, I’m afraid, but I think it was something like, oh, $164,000 a year. And she was somewhat…what’s that word of yours? Ah yes. Unproductive. So certain…decisions…had to be made. It’s a shame. It wasn’t that expensive a procedure, but once they changed Medicare, it became a bit, well, difficult to justify, and fewer surgeons were participating in Medicare, and the waiting period was rather long, and—”

“So WHERE IS SHE??!”

“She’s at your house, George. Of course, most days, she doesn’t recognize you. Needs round-the-clock care. Costing you a pretty penny.”

“Round the—"

“But look. Consider yourself lucky. You’ve saved all those tax dollars! You have the money to care for her!”

“I-I-I-I think this whole thing’s a fib! The bridge, the river, the college, the light rail and the civic center, the library, Tom’s business, the senior center, my mother…y-y-y-you’re one of those fake-news people, that’s what!”

“Oh dear, yes, fake news. Dja hear that, Gabriel? We’re fake news! Truth is, George, I’ve barely scratched the half of it. The rest is less…visual. But the worse school lunches, the end of free children’s health insurance, the asthma, the lead poisoning…”

My little parable doesn’t end the way the movie did, with George sobbing to Clarence “take me back.” That was Hollywood. In the real world, men of George Railey’s convictions don’t change their minds easily.

If the Republicans have their way, this venal tax bill is stage one an unprecedented assault on the commons. The idea, as I have written and as Paul Ryan has all but said, is to build up huge deficits (likely bigger than the stated $1.5 trillion) and then use those deficits as the excuse for going after Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, because, you know, those people have it too easy and spending on such things is evil and produces people with dependent tendencies. This is on top of all the other cuts that have been stripping our public life to the bone.

So as you drive around your town over the holidays, imagine it without the things built and maintained with tax dollars. Wipe them off the landscape in your mind one by one, as if in a movie, as you drive past them, and think about what life would be like without those things.

If you did some research, you’d be surprised at what will disappear. Parks, airports, and even things you assume are private like hotel-conference centers were often built at least in part with federal money. Go read about the projects that were financed by the Build America Bonds in the hated Obama stimulus bill. Thousands of projects. And that’s just one program out of hundreds.

Those programs answer public needs that you can’t fix with your tax cut and that private enterprise won’t undertake—no matter how big their tax cut.