Washington State passed a two year budget the other day. It cuts funding for medical services for the poor and plugs budget gaps with a 1.9 percent cut in teachers’ pay. Other school personnel will lose 3 percent of their paychecks.

For the life of me, I cannot understand that this is who we have become: a public that would rather not pay a 5 cent premium for sodas and bottled water in order to maintain funding for schools; who would rather see poor people waste medical resources by using the emergency department as their primary care physician (and many of those people are the working poor) than ask the richest of us to pay a 2 percent income tax (currently Washington state is funded by sales taxes, which are regressive and subject to intense fluctuations depending on the economy). We talk about how cushy the jobs are for teachers, many of whom can’t afford to live anywhere near where they teach, even with housing costs down and interest rates at record lows. We talk about how all this money we send to the government is ours and they shouldn’t have a dime of it.

Bull crap. You want stuff like roads and schools and clean hospitals? You pay taxes. You want to be the country that takes care of the least of its citizens or the country that lets the really rich run the show and shout how they pay too much in taxes so why not cut the services instead? The people who use those services most, who don’t go to private schools and have concierge healthcare services, who work one or two minimum wage jobs and still barely make ends meet, who have disabled adult children who are being turfed from programs that give their working elderly parents some respite from changing diapers on children who outweigh them by half — these are the people who pay the price when people convince themselves they can have something for nothing.

I thought Washington was different. I thought that we didn’t want to be one of those states at the bottom of every list, where businesses are happy to relocate because there are no unions and no taxes and where the people who fall below the poverty line are so poor some of them don’t have running water or electricity. In 21st Century America there are people so poor they don’t have running water or electricity.

I know that there are good people who disagree with me on every point I have made. But I would hope everyone would agree that if you want to live in a certain way, you have to pay a price for it. I don’t think most people want to live the way they have voted. I think they have decided they want someone else to pay. The problem is that now, everyone who has to have a child in public school will pay; everyone who drives on potholed roads will pay; everyone who wants to have a good college education available to their children for a price that isn’t close to what a private college costs will pay — that is if their kids can even get into public colleges, who are cutting enrollments and raising tuitions to help deal with the cost cutting happening at the state level. This is who we have become. Think of that next time you buy a soda and thank the voters for not making you pay an extra nickel for it.