Almost 20 years ago, when private businesses were required to tally up how much they were spending (and would spend in the future) on retirement benefits for their staff, the vast majority of them stopped promising such generous packages.  Once they realized how expensive they were, they realized that they couldn’t afford them.  Ever behind the curve, the government is still scrambling to figure out how it will fund healthcare and pension promises made to workers with unions so powerful that reform is practically not an option.

Today, Anne Arundel County spends almost $80 million per year on healthcare benefits for current and retired employees.  There are 512,790 people living in Anne Arundel County.  If each of these people contributed an equal share in county taxes towards this sum, they would all owe $156 every year for public employee healthcare benefits just to keep things on an even keel and accrue no additional debt.  On top of this, however, they would be responsible for putting aside money for pension contributions, current salary obligations, and a whole host of other things that governments do that cost money.

Clearly, the cost of running a government is steep.  We have made a lot of very expensive promises to many, many different groups.  We have promised generous pay and benefits to our employees.  We have promised prompt police and fire response to our residents.  We have promised strong public schools to our families, well-stocked libraries to our readers, freshly-paved roads to our drivers, and on and on and on.

Are these promises bad things?  Not necessarily.  We make use of many of these things on a daily basis.  Indeed it is almost impossible not to, which makes it difficult to complain too loudly about high taxes.  But at a time when our government is having trouble paying all its bills, we need to start taking a hard look at all the promises that we have made.

The awful reality is that some of these promises will simply have to be broken, unless we want to increase taxes more and more each year to keep pace with the rising cost of all these obligations.  Americans may be okay with it at first, but it will get harder and harder to swallow as more jobs are destroyed and more families find themselves falling into debt to maintain some semblance of a normal life.

Nothing is sacred.  We need to take a hard look at everything that has come to be known as an “essential” service of the government and ask ourselves if the service still deserves such privileged status.

Take, for example, the post office.  Do we really need in-home mail service six days a week?  How much money could we save by cutting this back to two days per week?  How much money could we save by not delivering to homes at all, but by simply holding all mail at the closest post office and emailing folks to come in and pick up their letters or packages upon arrival?

If that example made you cringe, then it should also make you feel some sympathy for our elected officials.  We are asking them to solve our country’s financial problems without drastically raising taxes and without resorting to such major changes to the way of life to which we have grown accustomed.

But if we really want to see positive changes enacted without sizeable tax increases, then we need to show them that we aren’t afraid to challenge the norm and think outside the box -- and that we won’t punish the politicians that do.