Taxes pay for services

Somehow the above statement is something that sometimes seems to escape us in talking about budgets:

Taxes pay for services.

The money that plows our streets, pays our police officers, buys our firetrucks, heats our schools, inspects our restaurants, and keeps our libraries open are tax dollars.
Some are city tax dollars, some are state tax dollars, some are federal tax dollars, but they're all tax dollars. It isn't magic money that falls out of the sky; it comes from taxpayers.

This past Sunday's column by Nick Kotsopoulos (despite its misleading title) does a great job of laying out what this means.