An article in yesterday’s WaPo bemoaning the impoverished knowledge of civics among American youth contained the following gem:

“Only 55 percent of fourth-graders, for example, could identify an important reason for raising taxes.”

Oh golly, can the end of our fair republic be far off when 45% of our precious little ones can’t come up with reasons to raise taxes? In all seriousness, a couple of points here. First, notice the language here: identify an important reason. One does not identify what doesn’t exist: the implication is that of course, we all just know there are important reasons to raise taxes, and these benighted kids couldn’t identify any of them. You also have to wonder about the process by which these questions were arrived at: did they ask the kids to think of good reasons for cutting taxes? Would failure there have counted as a sign of poor citizenship? Finally, does this really mean that the kids were of such impoverished imagination that they couldn’t come up with any nice things a government might do with more money? Or is it, rather, that at least some of them just didn’t think higher taxes (maybe only because their parents complain about them frequently) were a good idea? If the latter, maybe the “wrong” political opinion is being interpreted as political ignorance.