THE TAX BURDEN

I drew this cartoon after reading George Lakoff’s book The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant!  In it he documents how the Republican Right in America came to dominate the political framework of American politics, setting the agenda and terminology in which politics in America is conducted.   In one section of the book he describes how the Republicans promoted the term “the tax burden” to reframe taxation as a negative action with no benefits to taxpayers.

This cartoon attempts to point out the benefits of taxation that we all enjoy, a kind of variation on John Cleese’s “what have the Romans ever done for us” speech in The Life of Brian.