In my usual scanning of the headlines and news aggregators today, my attention was drawn to a story from the land of my youth, Northeastern Pennsylvania (reported by venerable and often delightfully quirky and local WNEP) about schools in Luzerne County threatening to call CPS/Foster care on families with overdue lunch money bills.

As comments sections on local news stations never disappoint, much of the discussion on Newswatch 16’s site’s comments section was all about dumping on “freeloaders” who were surely spending money “on dope” or whatever, and using barely-veiled dog-whistle racist language, and complaining about how their taxes are high enough, and general resentment about paying for others’ education or well-being*.

For the record, Luzerne County went 67.4% Republican in the 2016 Presidential race, and, for context, 16.9% of households (approximately 52,000 people) receive government food assistance.

A lot of the discussion of the article I first encountered, being presented on a site that’s a bit more of a liberal enclave than local news affiliate comment boards, trended toward the issues with school funding and the general misallocation of monies in education (for the record – or at least according to this source – Pennsylvania’s education spending is 6th highest in the nation, but it’s distribution system is antiquated, unpredictable, and one of the most regressive in the nation), as well as issues of food insecurity, teachers paying for student supplies, and even food, out of their own pocket, and the relative merits and benefits of schools providing free breakfast and lunch for students (which are significant), especially in less affluent areas like, say, Luzerne County, where schools receive less state funding, since property taxes (the primary source of education funding) are significantly lower than the state average.

Yet residents of that area continue the refrain of complaining that their taxes shouldn’t be used to pay for programs, like education and food aid, that don’t benefit them directly**.

That got me to thinking, of course, of a particular quotation that I like:

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (attributed)

According to my quick research, this quotation, or variations of it, did come directly from Justice Holmes, according to anecdotes in various biographies, as well as in a few Supreme Court opions written by him. Whether accurate or not, though, the meaning carries through, and it’s a valuable sentiment, and one I wholeheartedly subscribe to.

It may draw significant attention to my heart bleeding liberally to the left, but I’m a definite adherent to the idea that investing in people with tax dollars benefits all of us, even if I don’t benefit *directly* from said spending. Taking the example that prompted these thoughts, I have no problem with my taxes benefiting the education of children that aren’t mine; the reason being that those children will someday be adults working in my community, and I’d really rather they had the skills and knowledge to make them successful and productive members of society; an educated populace benefits us all, whether it be public sector bureaucrats like myself understanding the laws and policies of government, those in the legal system knowing and understanding the law, or simply the cashier at the grocery store being able to county my change accurately. The success of others benefits me through their ability to contribute to the community, and frankly, that success begins with kids in the classroom not being distracted from their education by hunger.

I don’t complain about paying taxes; it’s one of the responsibilities of citizenship (and the responsibilities get lost in talk of rights more often than not) and part of being an active member of the community. That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions and very strong feelings about how those tax dollars should be spent (which I regularly share with my representitives in government), especially since as a public sector bureaucrat myself, I have a first-hand perspective on how that money gets spent, and I can tell you from experience, we could do a lot better in that area.

So yeah, getting back to the point that started off all these statistics and political philosophizing…maybe we’d be better off feeding the kids than spending money to refer overdue lunch bills ($22,000 across the entire county) to child protective services, who, frankly, have bigger things to worry about.

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* – Full Disclosure: My attention to this particular issue may indeed be driven by my personal experience with people I knew grewing up who complained about “those people” freeloading off the system, while collecting public assistance themselves, and not seeing or acknowledging the obvious discontinuity. Irked me then as a much less educated and more conservative youth, irks me even more now.

** – I don’t intend to dump on the land of my birth at the expense of the land where I built my adult life (which spends a bit less on average than Pennsylvania on education, and has it’s own issues); I encounter similar commentary here in suburban Virginia, (my county being a bit more conservative politically than average in the metropolitan area – my county went Republican by a 2.3% margin) – my little village was one of the early hotbeds of “Tea Party” patriots a few years back, after all.