August 6, 2003 - There is this homeless guy wandering around downtown. It is July and the temperature is in the 90s. He is wearing a black watch-cap; a wool sweater ragged at the cuffs; a military style khaki overcoat and Vietnam era shoepacks. He carries two duffels that must be packed full of his personal possessions. He marches and occasionally stops to argue with his companion; a companion that we cannot see. Why don’t they do something?

The highway from Champaign to Monticello is full of cracks and potholes and you can see rust leaching at the edges of the pavement at the Camp Creek Bridge. Every once in a while the highway department crew shovels an asphalt and gravel mix into the worst of the holes in the concrete and pours hot sticky tar into the cracks. It lasts a week or two. Why don’t they do something?

Every Monday a parade of unemployed fathers separated from their families and unable to meet their child support obligation troop before the bench to display to the Judge copies of the applications for employment that they submitted that week. Every Monday they leave the courtroom on a quest for a non-existent job. They are the “discouraged workers” whose unemployment benefits have run out. Why don’t they do something?

When night falls there is a market on a street corner in Champaign. Business is good and the cash is exchanged for a small package. Same place every night. Everybody knows where it is and when the Black and Whites show up the market simply moves on until they leave. Why don’t they do something?

Why don’t they do something? The “they” that we want to do something is us. Why don’t WE do something? The fact is that we don’t want to pay the cost of doing something. We want what ever is done to be done without paying taxes, without being burdened by our share of the cost. We want to end big government – but not that part of government that we use or benefit from so we buy into the pleasant fiction of a “tax cut” and think we are getting something for nothing.

The fact is that cutting taxes on part of the population at the Federal level means money is not there to pay for the social cost of broken pavement and broken lives but that cost will be paid one way or the other. If States and localities have to pick up more of the burden those taxes will have to go up. If the cost is beyond the resources of State and local government it will be paid by the people directly either in cash or in the further deterioration of the already broken pavements and lives.