“If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
“If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
“If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
“If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
“Don’t ask me what I want it for
“If you don’t want to pay some more
“Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman…
“And you’re working for no one but me.
— George Harrison, “Taxman”
We’re not living the American Dream. We’re in the grip of a financial nightmare.
We the people have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
We get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die, and yet we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.
Case in point: Lawmakers across the country have been acting as fronts for corporations, sponsoring more than 10,000 model laws written by corporations, industry groups, and think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Make no mistake: It is fascism disguised as legislative expediency.
As a recent investigative report by USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity points out, these copycat bills have been used to “override the will of local voters” and advance the agendas of the corporate state. “Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called ‘model’ bills get copied in one state capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.”
In this way, laws that promise to protect the public actually bolster the corporate bottom line.
For example, “The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help individuals exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The ‘HOPE Act,’ introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.”
Talk about Orwellian.
So we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn.
We’re being forced to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, for misguided pork barrel projects that do little to enhance our lives, and for the trappings of a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
All the while, the government continues to do whatever it likes, levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly, with little thought for the plight of its citizens.
If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the Nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.
Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed, and undeterred in its money grabs.
Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power, and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets, and penalties.
With every new tax, fine, fee, and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.
We are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.
It isn’t freedom.
Unfortunately, somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens who pander to the worst vices in our nature: Greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.
The American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse, and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
We are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate, empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.
Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat, and tears to target, imprison, and entrap us.
All of those nefarious government deeds that you read about in the paper every day: Those are your tax dollars at work.
So what are you going to do about it?
There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats, and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.
After all, the government isn’t taking our money to make our lives better.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
It is nothing less than financial tyranny.
—The Rutherford Institute