$ 1.35

Bin Laden was enough for a short while. Before the dust had time to lie down, politics returned to its rams. The main of them is the name "deficit". The country, they tell us, owed so much that now it stands on the edge of the cliff. Maybe it is, but I still don’t worry too much, because I have already heard this - in the era of Reagan. However, one fine day - already under Clinton - the deficit disappeared. Moreover, Washington had a profit, and the country again took the usual place on the edge of the abyss, because it could not divide the excess. It was then that doubt arose in me. The American economy is so big and incomprehensible that "the president screams into the phone, not noticing that the telephone wire is cut" (Toffler). Since then, I stopped believing that Reagan had ruined the treasury, and Clinton filled it. Money is like trees. They better know how to grow if they are not exterminated to the root, how the Communists loved to do it.

Of course, financial fatalism is a weak consolation for an individual, especially an unemployed person, but the state is easier. He always has a way out, and even I know which one. To pay off debts, you need to raise taxes, it is best - for gasoline, which in America is even one and a half times cheaper today than in neighboring and also huge Canada. The more expensive gasoline, the smaller the car, the cleaner the air, the more hopes to find an alternative to oil and get rid of its curse - those who do not have oil, but, especially those who have it.

Taxes, however, is a terrible word. And since it is more difficult to go around the policy than the economy, there is only one way out: to cut on the living. Not daring to discuss the three truly deep financial abysses: defense, medicine and pensions, Congress saves trifles. Most of all I am annoyed by the tinyness of those who demand to cancel state subsidies to non -profit television. In New York, we have a 13th channel that accompanies the audience from the cradle to the grave. He teaches children to read, opens the opera, adults pampering with classics, the elderly consoles with cozy English detectives, where there is always a non -fire, and no one is sorry, because only bad and quickly are killed. For all these joys, the treasury spends such an amount that if you divide it into all, then $ 1.35 will be released for each taxpayer: one paper cup of nasty coffee per year. In response to the threat of savings, America reaches for a wallet. In the end, the federal budget covers only 10% of expenses. The remaining money comes not from the state, but from society.

This division comes from the original antiquity of the New World. Americans (who are more, who are less) are convinced that the state is them, and society is we. The first is evil, albeit necessary, the second is good, albeit selective. The state, which wages wars, charges taxes and imposes rules, unites the country. Her society, the country, shares - by interests, first of all, of course, religious, but not only.

In fact, everything that I love in America arose and exists thanks to society, not the state. Symphony orchestras, opera theaters, Buddhist monasteries, radio stations of classical music, literary clubs and, of course, museums in which there is not a single picture paid by taxpayers.