American attitudes about taxes

Reading about European taxes makes me think a lot more about my own. People complain that my community in Illinois is a high-tax environment but I wish more people would do a cost/benefit analysis of what they get for their money. I find it’s always an INCREDIBLE value.

For example, the airport here charges me approximately $130 a year for tax support. Every-time the three of us fly to Denver directly from my airport, I save $30 each bus fare to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Our 3-4 hours involved riding the bus is also time that could have been used a different way. That’s worth money. Using my own airport, I can leave my home and be on the plane sitting in my seat in 20 minutes. Extraordinary!

The airport manager’s goal is to have the airport so busy, we don’t even pay taxes to support it. It becomes self-sustaining. My airport tax cost-benefit calculations do not even count the benefit to me of all the jobs that are created by having a terrific airport in my community. There are a lot of those jobs. So I easily get my money worth on that investment.

I pay approximately $130 for my local public library. I try to get at least quadruple the investment back every year. That’s just with my use, not even counting my children’s use of the facility. That is so easy! It allows me to avoid the cost of cable TV (currently running $70 at a minimum in my community) or a membership to Blockbuster or Netflix. I see books I want to buy in the bookstore and then go to the library and borrow them. I read and check out magazines and newspapers that I enjoy but don’t want to subscribe to yearly. Does it really matter if I read Architectural Digest in the month it’s issued? I think not.

Again, those calculations don’t include my children’s use of the library (I especially appreciate the local scholarship database) or all of the other people in my community who are uplifted to a higher, better place by the use of the facility. Surely less taxes are consumed overall when more people become self-sufficient.

Today I was thinking about what an incredible value the school system is. My children’s school system gets horrible press. What urban system doesn’t? One has to proactively choose a school system and a program within a school system just the way one would choose a melon at the market.

I choose to move to my community specifically for these schools. Within the larger system, there was a tiny gifted program getting by on funding scraps because it’s not particularly valued by the community. My children have received incredible individual mentoring from these teachers. Mostly, because they were open to it.

If I had sent my children to a gifted program in a university town, everyone would want in and everyone would be eligible. But in an industrial town, rigorous academics aren’t as highly valued because that’s not where the money has been made in the past. Money, for both the owners and the workers, has been made in manufacturing. All of that manufacturing has now moved to China. That’s another topic.

The high school my children attended had the schizophrenic distinction of being named one of 1700 “drop-out factories” by John Hopkins University (for the last twenty years only half of the freshman class went on to be sophomores) and “one of America’s 500 best high schools” by U.S. News and World Report all within the same quarter.

The little tiny gifted program my children are in turns out ACT scores in the top 1% of the nation. My oldest daughter left there with enough Advanced Placement credit to save $16,000 in tuition (one university semester). One boy I know of was able to start his college career with so much advanced placement credit he was classified as a second semester sophomore when he started college!

If I add up all of the money saved through advanced placement credit, scholarships obtained etc. and hold it up what I’ve paid in property taxes over the last five years for all services (school, airport, city, library, etc.), I’m still money ahead.

Of course, no one is out “selling” parents on this gem of a curriculum. Most people just see how rough the neighborhoods are. It can be a very rough place. I’ll never forget one young man’s joy when he saw his passing Constitution test grade. Passing that test was his last to-do item before graduating. He could not stop shouting with joy “I’m out of the ‘hood! I’m out of the ‘hood! I’m going to graduate!” I still tear up when I think of him. That too is an education for my children.