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December 20, 2012 at 11:12 PM
On a family trip to Mickey Mouse headquarters (Disney World) last month (a trip I highly recommend for everyone; kids or no kids), we hit the toll road that takes you from Ocala into Orlando, Fla., where the magic makes it all believable. As we pulled up to the toll station, the toll taker cordially stuck her hand out and said, “$4.75, please!” My kids started asking questions. “Daddy, what was that?”
At that moment it hit me that a toll road is a good metaphor for our current fiscal cliff issues. Of course, for my children, it was a great educational moment, at which my wife turned to me and said, “Explain it in simple terms.” So over the next 20 to 30 minutes they learned how toll roads and bridges are built and funded, at a level a four- and five-year-old could understand. During my entire explanation, I continued to get the repetitive “Why?” so I had to try explaining it to them in a variety of ways. It was then that I realized half of America doesn’t even know why or what the fiscal cliff issues mean and why tolls are a great example of how our tax system should foster capitalism not socialism.
Here’s my thinking. The fee I paid to travel down the toll road is a form of tax/financing structure. The toll is used to pay back all the bond investors for their investment—with interest—as well as pay for the ongoing upkeep of the road. It requires management, budgeting, continuous monitoring and funding. Yet at the end of the day, the capitalistic investors who bought the bonds are the only ones at risk if everyone stops driving down the toll road. The money can’t be redirected for things like Social Security funding, Medicare funding, or even welfare financing, as the bond issue is specific in nature to the toll revenue collected.
That’s the opposite of our fiscal cliff issues, which are the direct result of mismanagement, over-spending and misappropriating money from one fund to another, which isn’t specific in nature to the revenue received. So here we are again at the so-called fiscal cliff, requiring the U.S. government’s borrowing cap limit to be increased, while forcing prudent citizens to pay more in taxes for which they receive no benefit.
