[Buddha-l] Republicans are happier ?

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 13 February 2008 10:51, Franz Metcalf wrote:

> Richard, shall we take the survey's implicit recommendation and jump
> on the elephant's back?

Suit yourself, Franz. The article makes it pretty clear that more Republicans 
than Democrats describe themselves as very happy, but the majority (55%) of 
Republicans do not describe themselves that way. Given that being Republican 
is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being very happy, I'd be 
inclined to choose a political affiliation by some other criterion.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a Quaker lobbying outfit that bore this 
sobering information: if you are a tax-paying American, then 43% of your tax 
dollars are going to support the military. 

Now I happen to be a very strong advocate of taxation, and I quite enjoy 
paying taxes and feel a certain amount of satisfaction in having made a 
contribution to the running of society. But when 43% of my taxes are going to 
paying for a military that has grown unreasonably and unnecessarily large, 
then the joy of paying taxes is seriously diminished. Moreover, when the 
Congress that I have helped to elect passes a bill extending the powers of 
the government to engage in aggressive interrogation methods 
(called "torture" in some circles) and to gather information on innocent 
citizens, and when my tax dollars are also paying for that, I become less 
than fully gruntled.

I'm thinking the time is fast approaching when the only morally responsible 
thing for an American to do is to refuse to pay the 43% of his or her taxes 
that go toward supporting a militaristic plutocracy that poses as a 
democracy. Refusing to pay, of course, will result in being given the 
opportunity to spend time in a government-sponsored facility at the expense 
of other taxpayers. Refusing to support state-sponsored murder and theft, it 
seems, is still a crime. 

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes