Rep. Michele Bachmann, the darling of the far-right and a contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency, says that in her travels of late, no one has said to her, “Please, tax me more.” But that’s a politically cheap and shallow question, as she — and many of her fellow Tea-Partiers — know.

The real question is, unfortunately, a little more complex. The real question is whether we, as a society, are willing to pay to keep our roads maintained. Our national parks open. Our food-safety inspectors at work. Our schools fully staffed. Our police officers on our streets. Our air clean and our water drinkable.

Ask someone if they’d like something for free, and undoubtedly they’d say yes. Ask someone how much they’d be willing to pay for something they value — or to choose among important, competing needs — and the conversation quickly becomes more nuanced.

In the charged and cheap rhetoric of national politics, few are asking thoughtful questions that require nuanced thinking. Thankfully, in King County, reasonable heads sometimes prevail, as they did Monday evening, when the county council voted 7 to 2 to tack a temporary $20 surcharge onto our car tabs to keep our mass transit system running.

Think about $20: Half a tank of gas; six lattes; four trips to McDonald’s. Then consider what would have been lost had this vote not gone through: 600,000 hours of annual bus service over the next two years or a 17 percent reduction of the entire system. Service that supports professionals who commute, low-income people who can’t afford cars, people on Vashon, on the Sammamish plateau, in Renton, in Shoreline, in Seattle’s diverse neighborhoods.

According to The Seattle Times, this was a tough and charged process. The two Republicans who decided to cross the aisle, as it were, and support the plan told the Times they’d received a death threat for their highly publicized stance. A death threat for a $20 car tab fee? That says much about how ludicrous these debates have become.

Government isn’t perfect. It is, at times, inefficient. Salaries for some of those in the top ranks of King County government are too high. 

But we can’t have meaningful discussions about government and how we want it to operate without stipulating to a basic fact: Taxes pay for services. Cut those taxes, and services are cut, too. The real question is not how much we’re willing to pay in taxes, but what kind of society we value and want to build.