Paul Sassone

Name? John Smith

Occupation? Taxpayer.

Wait. That’s not right. Taxpayer is not who we are. Paying taxes is what we do. And that is a big difference.

Our identity, what we are, is human being, mother, accountant, and so on. What we all do is pay taxes.

But political leaders don’t view us as having individual identities.

They lump us all together as taxpayers.

This is particularly true of politicians on the right.

Since paying lower taxes is the holy grail for right-wing politicians they assume that is what is most important to the rest of us.

So, in hopes of garnering public support, they give as the reason for most political policies or actions that it will protect taxpayers.

One example is Gov. Bruce Rauner’s omnipresent TV commercials in which his intransigence on the state budget is portrayed as a fight for taxpayers.

A fair response to this might be that the damage to Illinois services for the needy may be so severe an ultimate taxpayer-based budget might not be able to compensate for the pain and injury the budget stalemate cost.

And this is the danger of thinking of all of us as taxpayers first.

Conservative politicians cut taxes by cutting programs and services.

And that pleases us, the taxpayers, because we like to pay less taxes.

What this rosy picture leaves out is that we are not only taxpayers, we also are recipients of the cut programs and services.

We are elderly, we are sick, we are poor, we are hungry, we want our children educated, we want to be able to afford medical care.

And all of this is reduced or taken away by political leaders whose only care is taxes and how to lower them.

There is a trade-off. You may give less, but you also will get less.

This is not something you will hear from conservatives. For them, the job is done when taxes are cut. The consequences to the lives of countless people — often disastrous — are not their concern.

But we should always be aware that tax cuts have consequences.

We have to decide whether tax cuts are worth those consequences.

—Don’t forget that tax cuts have consequences–