We Hate To Pay Them, But...

Taxes matter. I blathered about this a few weeks ago, but Paul Krugman summed it up quite nicely in yesterday's NYT:

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

I need to post that FDR statement again. Poverty is real and it is serious. What kind of a nation are we if we can't help those in need? What kind of a nation are we if we turn a blind eye to human suffering - within our OWN borders, let alone the world? I absolutely cannot understand that.