I’m Alan, and I don’t exist.

Oh, I’m corporeal enough.  I have a temperature, a pulse, a bit more weight than I did in my younger days, and hair that’s gone gray.

I’m just not a part of the system that’s there to catch most of us when we fall.  And thus, I’m not technically part of Romney’s deeply derided 47%.  You know, the ones that “don’t pay taxes” – except we do.  Payroll taxes are income tax, except no one who pays them that way gets to use foreign accounts and convoluted shelters to hide behind in order to skip sending in a check – they’re deducted every time that eagle flies.  Then  there’s sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, state and local taxes, all kinds of ways we contribute to running things, really, far beyond the return we get here in middle-to-bottom-land.  Especially here in the blue states.  Go look it up.

You know the type he’s talking about.  The ones that look for handouts.  Wish I was.  I’d love to lay about and drink beer all day and have everything seen to by Uncle Sugar.  Except they don’t.  Being broke sucks.  Try it sometime.

I am, believe it or not, part of his much-vaunted 53%.

As a freelancer/contractor/project worker I don’t have payroll taxes deducted.

So I pay income tax.

And I know what those taxes pay for. They pay for the roads I drive on, the sidewalks I walk down, the water system that keeps me hydrated and lets me cook my interesting pasta dishes, the police and fire departments that are there in the slim and terrible likelihood that I would need their services, and yes, assistance to those who may need it through no doing of their own.

It’s part of the admission charge to a civilized society.

And that word, right there – SOCIETY – is what the libertarian utopians choose to overlook in their staggeringly shortsighted focus only on the economy. We live in a society. An economy is a component of that, not a substitute for it.

So if you’re so utterly convinced that the poor, the sick, the blind, the elderly, and the infants have it so amazingly good, why aren’t you rushing to join them?  It’s amazing to me that someone can seriously believe that the rich folks are taking all the risk in society.

And Willard, if you’re going to cry about those nasty, smelly taxes so damn much, let’s see those returns.  Show us the truly awful percentages you’re paying so we can at least sympathize.

You know, sympathy.

You’d find it in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis.