I’ll bet this happens to you, too. You’re heading to your parents’ house for Thanksgiving. Your folks live in a city that’s 300 miles away from the one you live in. So you drive up a ramp onto the interstate and then set the cruise-control for 65 mph.
But then a feeling comes over you. A tightness in the chest, like you’re about to have a heart attack. Your mood sours as you think about all the taxes that went into building this interstate you’re cruising down. You feel trapped and smothered. You’d rather be driving those 300 miles on a muddy, rutted-out county road, traveling at a maximum speed of 30mph, if it meant paying no taxes. Or you’d prefer to stop every half-hour on this interstate and pay a hefty toll to the company that built it.
Anything to stop from being squeezed and destroyed.
It’s too early for me to come up with a comment as clever as the other comments to this piece. Maybe after I’ve had more coffee?
I like services. Does that make me a Commie?
No, it makes you a New Yorker! 😉
And while we’re taking Senator Lee to task, let’s not overlook the stylistic problem with his statement: the expected order of emphasis would have “destroy” as the LAST of the 3 verbs, not first, since it’s much more serious than either “entrap” or “squeeze.”
His stylistic weakness taxes my patience.
And while we’re on the subject of Sen. Lee’s stylistic problems and since Bill Y’s 4/18 post raises the issue of ambiguous pronoun reference, I have to note that the “them” of Sen. Lee’s “let’s fix them” seems to refer to Americans more than to taxes, as if Sen. Lee is threatening to put Americans in a fix (a Freudian slip indicating what he really intends, perhaps).