So, as tax season comes around, some thoughts: My tax obligations haven't decreased this year compared to last. None of my friends have seen their rates decrease. I don’t see middle- or working-class Americans suddenly swimming in extra cash due to a tax holiday. But we all are getting way less bang for our bucks.
Last year, my taxes helped keep foreign aid flowing, to stop children starving, to prevent millions dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, polio. My tax dollars helped prevent Ebola outbreaks, and a range of zoonotic diseases, becoming global pandemics. My contributions to the treasury helped mitigate the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention dysentery, cholera and other diseases that needlessly kill in overcrowded refugee camps and amidst high concentrations of poverty.
Last year, my taxes helped fund a federal Education Department which, among other things, distributed resources to children with special needs and linked students up with federal loans. My tax dollars helped staff the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which worked to stop big players from scamming non-big players (in other words, ordinary consumers) by, for example, charging them exorbitant interest rates on credit card debt. Last year, my taxes paid for the NOAA to have sufficient numbers of scientists to predict weather emergencies and to give communities fair warning in the face of impending disasters.
Last year, my taxes helped keep enough National Park Service and Fire Service employees on hand to ensure parks and campsites could stay open, emergency crews could rescue stranded hikers, toilets in national parks could be cleaned, trails could be maintained, and, when fires broke out those fires could be effectively fought.
Last year, my taxes helped keep enough social security administration workers employed that people could actually reach someone when they phoned for advice. Last year, too, my taxes helped pay for food to be distributed to food pantries and low-income schools.
Last year, my taxes helped fund the US Institute for Peace, the anti-corruption units in the DoJ, OSHA investigations into workplace safety concerns. They helped provide services to assist immigrants seeking green cards or naturalization. A portion of my taxes went toward funding the refugee resettlement program, bringing into the country, and helping to assimilate, thousands of desperate people who would then turn their myriad talents toward benefiting their adopted country.
Last year, my taxes helped the Veterans Affairs administration staff up so as to care for veterans exposed to toxic burn sites, and they seeded job training programs to assist disabled people get and keep jobs. My tax dollars funded mental health and homelessness and addiction intervention services.
Last year, my taxes helped fund programs to tackle global warming and to vastly expand the country's EV charging infrastructure. Last year, my tax dollars helped tackle clean air issues in some of America's poorest communities.
Last year, my tax dollars helped sustain the best network of higher education institutions -- and their ranks of scholars—on earth.
This year, DOGE is taking the chainsaw to all these programs and services. Sure, at some point, the government might cut each of us mere mortals a check for a few hundred dollars as our DOGE-dividend. But the tradeoff is that we will have sacrificed basic government services worth exponentially more than that.
So, here's my question: given my tax dollars this coming year will be funding so many fewer services, why on earth am I, and you, and every other income earner who files a tax return, still sending the same percentage of our earnings to DC in taxes? Oh yes, because the oligarchs need their multi-trillion-dollar tax break, and Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, needs his vast, and ever-expanding, government contracts. That's where our tax dollars are going. You and I, we’re the chumps subsidizing Musk and Trump’s lifestyle.
To put it in the language of eggs, which drove so much election season rage: It’s as if last year you were able to buy a dozen eggs in your local supermarket for five dollars; and this year, the eggs are still sold for five dollars, but when you open the box you discover there are only six eggs inside. It’s as if you ask the supermarket manager where the additional six eggs are, and he brazenly tells you that he and all his cronies have decided to simply pocket the difference, and—making matters even worse for you, the disempowered consumer—he has decided to sell the egg-producing facilities to the wealthiest of his pals so that they can then sell them back you at ever-greater personal profit. And when you dare to query this, he tells you the reduced egg numbers are actually the fault of DEI programs and immigrants.
That’s a bait and switch trick I doubt anyone would stand for. Yet, here we are in tax season, and we’re all still putting in the same amount of money into the federal pot and getting far, far less back in return, while Trump blathers on about DEI and immigrants.
If you're not outraged by this, you're not paying attention.
