What's in it for me?

It's 6 a.m., and the alarm clock beside your bed starts buzzing.

After slapping the snooze button a couple times, you get up and shuffle to the bathroom, where you flip on the light, use the toilet and wash your hands.

It's just after 6 a.m., and already you've started using your taxes.

See, the electricity that powers your alarm clock is generated and delivered to your house by a utility regulated by the government. The water that flows to and from your house is provided by the Las Vegas Valley Water District, another government agency. (You pay user fees for the water and the sewer, but taxes built the wastewater treatment plant that will eventually pump the liquid to Lake Mead.) And the house in which all this is happening? It was inspected by a city or county employee to make sure it wouldn't come crumbling down one day.

You head to the kitchen for a little breakfast and to read the morning paper. The bacon and eggs you retrieve from the refrigerator were inspected under standards issued by the federal government. Ditto for the milk that goes onto your morning cereal, which also carries a government-mandated label telling you what's inside.

You flip on the TV to check out the Today show, which comes in clear as a bell, even if you don't have cable or satellite, thanks in part to the FCC's regulation of the public airwaves. And while you probably never stop to think about it, nobody broke into your house overnight and it didn't burn down; if either of those things had happened, you would have been able to call the police or the fire department, all of whom just happen to be paid with your taxes.

By the time you take a quick shower and head out the door, you'll have already used no fewer than nine different government services. And the day is just getting started.

"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

You hop into your car, which, thanks to the government's mandatory fuel standards, gets better mileage than a similar vehicle would have 20 years ago. And, it pollutes less.

The roads you drive on come courtesy of taxes that you pay at the pump. And the signal lights that keep traffic flowing (although not as smoothly as you like) are run by local governments, too. (In Clark County, by the way, there are 463 traffic signals, 334 of which are connected to a system in which the lights are allegedly timed to make your trip smoother.)

You drive by the new shopping center down the street; developers wanted to build it closer to your house, but the city refused, citing government-imposed zoning laws. As a result, your neighborhood looks better and has less traffic.

Further down the road, you see another car getting a ticket, and you slow down. On surface streets and highways, police officers and state troopers are looking out for bad drivers and drunk drivers, all the time. If you see an extra cop or two, it might be because voters in the valley narrowly approved an extra 1/4-cent sales tax for more officers last year.

You carry government-mandated auto insurance, and if you didn't, the DMV would be chasing you down to make sure you did. But you drive carefully anyway, to avoid accidents.

If you did get in an accident, however, a county-contracted ambulance would rush to the scene, probably to take you to University Medical Center, which boasts the valley's only Level 1 trauma center. The doctors, nurses and staff there are all paid with your tax dollars. (And despite some recent headlines about rivers of red ink and cozy contracts for friends of management, the hospital is still providing care, 24 hours a day.) If you were to see an accident, you'd be able to call it in on your cell phone. Even if you didn't know the address, police and fire departments could locate you using the Global Positioning System of satellites in orbit around Earth, all courtsey of U.S. taxpayers.

There aren't any accidents on the daily commute today, and you hardly notice when you drive over what looks like a gully; it's actually one of Clark County's 128 miles of improved flood-control channels. It's not raining today, but if it did, water would flow down those channels or into the 92 miles of storm drains so it wouldn't gather on the streets. (Sure, it still pools in places, but without the taxpayer-financed flood control, it could be a lot worse.)

You flip on the radio to listen to KNPR-FM 89.5, which is brought to you in part by taxes. Again, thanks to the FCC, the signal is clear, because only Nevada Public Radio is allowed to legally broadcast on that frequency.

You're not even to work yet, but the benefits of paying your taxes are multiplying.

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy."

-- U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall

You don't work in a slaughterhouse or a factory, but your office is still safer than it might be otherwise, because local, state and federal governments have occupational health departments and fire marshals who ensure workplace accidents stay at a minimum.

Thanks to the government, nobody who works anywhere in Nevada can make less than $6.15 per hour, unless their job provides health benefits. The payroll taxes charged to your employer go to the state, which uses them to maintain prisons, run the court system, and provide public education. The Social Security and Medicare withholding go to keep those programs running.

But if you got laid off, that money would come back to you, in the form of unemployment insurance. And, everybody hopes, Social Security will still be around when you retire to cushion whatever you manage to save on your own for life after work.

At your job, you can't be sexually harassed and you can't be discriminated against, all thanks to laws passed and enforced with your tax dollars.

It's almost lunchtime, but before you duck out, you sneak a quick peek at your stocks online. (The government, by the way, invented the Internet, which almost all businesses use in some way today.) Your portfolio is down slightly, but you're not worried, since the Securities and Exchange Commission exists to detect and prevent any fraud. No, it didn't stop Enron, at least not until it was too late. But that's an exception that tends to prove the rule.

You drive down to a local casino for lunch, where you toss a few bucks into a video poker machine. You lose, as usual, but you don't suspect cheating, since the Gaming Control Board has inspected and tested the machines and the software that runs them. Besides, some of the money you just lost is going to benefit you even if you lose; gambling taxes account for about half of the general fund, and the sales tax dropped in the casinos by all those tourists provide some of the rest.

As you walk back to your car, you see a big, graceful 747 coming in for a landing at McCarran International Airport. The airport runs without tax subsidies these days, but your taxes definitely pay for the air traffic controllers who make sure the planes don't crash. And while you get stuck behind a CAT bus -- again -- on the way back to work, you realize that taxpayer supported service is vital for people who don't have cars to get around. Ditto for school buses that relieve busy parents of the task of taking their kids to school, and picking them up.

Before heading back, you make a quick stop at the bank. You've probably never stopped to read the sticker, but if you did, you'd see that the government has insured your deposits, up to about $100,000, in the event the bank goes under. (With the fees they charge, that's probably never a real danger.)

On the way out, you pass a storefront that sells cell phones but looks a little shady. You don't go in, but anybody who did get ripped off there can count on the taxpayer-paid attorneys up in the Attorney General's Bureau of Consumer Protection to get involved, and prevent others from suffering the same fate.

"If you earn more than $100,000 or you're a millionaire, you're a lot more likely to be audited these days than just a few years ago."

-- IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson

On the way back to the office, you listen to KNPR again, where you hear a debate about the Iraq war. Agree or disagree, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who deploy overseas (and deter America's enemies) are paid with taxes. It's impossible to put a price on how much safer we actually are because of our military, but Defense Department spending for the 2007 fiscal year was an estimated $2.2 trillion, according to the department's website. It's a lot, but new aircraft carriers don't come cheap. And we may never know how much the "black" budgets of the country really are, but the work of the CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, and all the other "alphabet soup" agencies have given America an advantage on the world stage, all courtesy of her taxpayers.

As you drive, you notice that a block wall outside a tract of homes no longer bears the graffiti it had yesterday; the employees of the county's Public Response office were out this morning to remove it. That gets you to thinking about crime, and you recall your friend who had his identity stolen. Those kinds of cases are worked on by law enforcement agencies from the U.S. Secret Service all the way down to Metro Police, and they're prosecuted by the district attorney.

You pass a public school, one of 326 elementary, middle and high schools in the valley, where kids are studying to pass required exams to get into college, perhaps aided by the government-run (but not taxpayer-financed) Millennium Scholarship named for former Gov. Kenny Guinn. Kids who graduate and get good jobs will join you someday, paying their share of taxes and reaping the benefits, too.

"Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes -- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?"

-- Former U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater

So what's the point of all this? Simply this: They don't just burn your tax money, or bake it into pies. They do something with it, often things that the public simply takes for granted.

Plenty of people complain about taxes, but very few of those people stand up to say they want to sit in heavy traffic every day, or want their street to flood when it rains, or want kids without education and hope of a future wandering the streets.

You get something for all that money, even if you don't see it immediately.

"People have general mindsets about it: Taxes are bad, but why aren't they fixing that road," says Guy Hobbs, a consultant and former finance director for Clark County. "People are amazed when you explain that to them."

It's not that people don't get it; it's that they've been conditioned by years of rhetoric -- mostly from conservatives -- that government is bad, taxes are too high and the private sector can do things better, more cheaply and with greater efficiency.

As a result, people simply expect roads, schools and sewers to be there for them.

Most of us would never drop by the local 7-Eleven and tell the clerk we want a Slurpee, but we're not going to pay for it. But when it comes to taxes, that's exactly what many people say.

"Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die," says Terry Murphy, who works as a consultant and pollster, but used to be the head of Clark County's administrative services.

Murphy has documented this double-mindedness, in fact. In a poll she conducted in 2005, 800 registered Nevada voters said they would support a candidate who wanted more money for schools (75.5 percent) and more money for roads (68.5 percent). But the same survey found that 68 percent would support a candidate who wanted to limit spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth, the plan embodied by state Sen. Bob Beers' Tax and Spending Control initiative in 2006.

"The average person who is not politically connected, they don't think about it," Murphy says.

Hobbs agrees: "We spend a hefty amount of time speaking out of both sides of our mouth here."

State Sen. Dina Titus, who ran against Gov. Jim Gibbons in 2006 and lost, notes the irony, too. Lobbyists or officials from four counties in Nevada have come to her, asking for help raising taxes on hotel rooms, sales, real estate transfer fees or property, for various local projects. But voters in November in all four of those counties went for the anti-tax Gibbons.

Similarly, officials with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Latin Chamber of Commerce have lamented scant funds for road building and education, respectively. Yet both groups endorsed Gibbons as being good for business in 2006. Now that he's keeping the no-taxes pledge that helped get him elected, they're complaining.

"Government is not a solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

-- Former President Ronald Reagan

For his part, Beers says Nevada has hidden many of the taxes its residents pay, and plenty of people would be surprised if they saw the bottom line. And he can cite many examples where tax money is wasted, the benefits clipped. Take for example the Pleasant Valley Bridge, a $600-million engineering marvel that could have easily been obviated, he says, with $120 million in road improvements elsewhere.

Another example: A Nevada health-care information office employs eight people. A small percentage of the callers are Spanish. While the governor wanted to wait until an opening occurred to hire a bilingual worker, the Senate Finance Committee voted to add a ninth position to the workforce, with salary, benefits and retirement costs.

"You can't paint all of the people with the same paintbrush," he says.

Some people, he says, really don't want their taxes raised, and they're willing to forego government services as a result.

"Some of them are saying that they want another park or the roads aren't good enough. Others are saying 'I don't want another park, the roads are fine. I don't want my taxes raised,'" Beers says.

And many don't realize the scope of what government does because they work their jobs, take care of themselves and never have occasion to see government in action.

"You don't understand half of what government does because you don't use it," he says.

Hobbs says something along these same lines: Different people demand different government services. Parents want good schools, seniors want access to affordable health care and people who are well off don't really think about social services, since they don't use them. "Not everybody has the same thing in common," he says.

"Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

So how can political leaders reverse decades of anti-tax political rhetoric that began with Goldwater, continued through Reagan and even took hold in the administration of former President Bill Clinton? "I don't know what the best way is, but it's going to take a long time," says blogger Hugh Jackson, a former editor of CityLife. "This is your government. When you're talking about government is evil, you're talking about you. So stand up and be ... a public citizen."

Hobbs says he's a conservative, although his analysis work is sometimes used to justify tax increases, most notably in 2003, when a task force recommended a gross receipts tax that was ultimately rejected. He says his conservative beliefs gave way to the pragmatic need to fix problems. "You can't have that mantra 'No new taxes ever' because you've got to pay for all this stuff," he says.

Titus, who was defeated in part because Gibbons said endlessly on the campaign trail that "I'll save you money, she'll cost you money," says the rhetoric is very powerful.

"The public has become more cynical. They don't trust government. They don't believe government can get the job done," she said.

Beers, however, suggests there's also an avarice behind the social contract idea. "Most of the social advocates don't say 'I want to increase socialized medicine for uninsured mothers; raise my taxes.' They say 'I want to increase medical services for uninsured mothers; raise his taxes,'" he says.

Jackson takes aim squarely at those who elevate the private sector with an almost religious devotion. "It's not like the private sector is efficient. It's not like the private sector has the market on honesty, morality and efficiency," he says. "The notion that the private sector is intellectually and morally superior to anything in the public sector is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt."

For example: The overhead of health-care agencies in the private sector is about 30 percent; in Medicare, it's just 3 percent.

People, Jackson says, have lost sight of the notion of a social contract that says we're all part of society, and we'll do certain things for the benefit of all, like education and health care. Without that safety net, there's chaos. "Those are the people who revolt in other societies," he says.

And to come back from "decades of the right-wing echo chamber," we're going to need leaders, Jackson says. "People don't want to pay taxes, politicians want to get elected, and politicians don't have any guts," he says.

"Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over. Well, how come?" Jackson asks. "Big business isn't over. I don't want big business out there doing whatever it wants. Who's going to watch over big business if not big government?"