You know what I miss, that I NEVER thought I’d miss? Traffic cops. I know, I can’t believe it, either but…have you driven recently? OH! EM! GEE! A couple of days ago, I was getting on the freeway after the metering lights had activated. I was heading up a two-lane on-ramp in the right lane with a car on my left. I was next to, but a hair behind, my “fellow motorist.” I really don’t know what she was thinking but it appeared she decided she was going to get through the lights faster in the right lane than if she stayed where she was – so she started coming over.

This was not an erroneous lane change attempt immediately aborted when you realize there’s another car there with an embarrassed little wave. This was…aggressive. She wanted the lane I was in, seemed to know I was there, and decided to move me out of her way so she could get what she wanted. She made two distinct swerves, in what looked like an effort to force me to hit my brakes and back off. (There was a car behind me and such a move may or may not have resulted in my car being rear-ended.) It is NOT to my defensive-driving credit that I didn’t yield. My Driver’s Education teacher would have been mortified. (Sorry, Mr. Marzett.)

She dared me not to get hit by her. I dared her to hit me. Thankfully, she didn’t. She retreated to the lane she had started in. This is my favorite part – we happened to arrive at the line at the same time, waiting for the light. (She had that very intentional “I’m not looking your way” attitude.) We only waited a moment when her light turned green! Had she succeeded in pushing me aside so she could move faster, she actually would have slowed herself (and me) down! I laughed at her as she drove off.

Yeah, one story, one time. Oh, you think? I own a small swimming pool service. I drive a LOT. Things like this happen daily. People force their way into lines and make last-minute lane changes that look like nothing so much as an attempt to confuse their fellow motorists. They drive FAR too fast or frustratingly FAR too slowly in the wrong lane. People ignore traffic controls like, you know, red lights and stop signs. There is a sense that not all of our fellow motorists understand (or actually know) the rules of the road. There’s a segment of our population that WILL NOT, under any circumstances nor for any reason, move into a line of traffic at the end where it’s clear and safe for them to do so. Instead, they STAND on their accelerators until they’ve moved in front of a few cars in the line and then force their way in – again, daring people not to get hit by them.

I’ve come to see the decline in the population’s ability to drive safely as a microcosm of the decline in our society overall. People drive poorly out there for two reasons: one, they were never taught to drive here and two, there are not enough cops to root out those who are on the road, but shouldn’t be. BOTH problems exist for the same reason: there’s not enough money to cover the vital functions government used to cover. The result? Steadily increasing chaos.

The solution is simple. I hinted at it in the second paragraph. See, I learned to drive in school. Both the classroom segment and the time-behind-the-wheel part were taken care of during school hours – and everyone who went to school, rich and poor alike, participated. That meant that, by and large, all Californians drove pretty much the same because we were all taught the same. One could know what their fellow motorist was likely to do because we all received the same training from the same curriculum. Then, California’s Proposition 13 passed. Schools were suddenly starved for money and driver training (along with bus service) was one of the first programs to go.

Proposition 13 was one of the wealthy class’s earliest and most successful assaults in their class war. It was a tax trick, a gift to corporations, sold as a tax benefit to Joe Sixpack. EVERYBODY’S property tax was reduced to a previous year’s level, then property taxes only increased with a sale of the property. Single family homes turn over regularly, so tax rates have increased over time as the houses are bought and sold. Large corporations don’t really sell their property, though. If there’s a sale, the property is simply transferred as part of the company assets so no new assessment is ever triggered. This means many corporations in California are still paying property tax at a 1973 rate, while all the homeowners are trying to make up the shortfall.

A new business model was created: driver training schools – but they are expensive. If all of one’s discretionary cash is tied up in food and shelter, there’s nothing for formal driver training. The family teaches their young to drive as well as they can but often were not formally trained themselves. Our roads are now infested with untrained, unlicensed, and uninsured drivers. As tax revenues have fallen, municipalities are forced to pick and choose where their reduced police forces might be most effective – and traffic control took a major hit so there’s no one out there to catch the untrained and get them trained. Chaos.

This is all the predictable and inevitable result of constant tax cuts for the rich and the “cut services” mantra. When one combines the effect of too-low tax revenues with the effect of an economy built to impoverish as many people as possible, chaos on the roadways (not to mention increases in crimes of all kinds) seems unavoidable. ALL of it stems from the conservative fever-dream the country has suffered for the last fifty years. (I don’t really blame cons for this. They’re simply the tools of the wealthy class, but without those “tools,” the rich could not have succeeded so brilliantly, so…completely at dismantling a once-great nation…)

I’ll tell you this: I live by an adage: when your outgo is greater than your income, your upkeep will be your downfall. This is true in a household budget and it’s true for a national economy. The thing is, when one’s expenses exceed one’s income there are TWO possible ways to respond. The first is to cut expenses – which America has done, now, FAR beyond advisability and much to it’s own detriment – but the second is to raise revenue. In governments, that means tax increases and we should focus those increases on the people who, after all, have all the money…