Our tax money is spent, in part, on killing people. We pay taxes so politicians can purchase machines and pay soldiers to go kill people. These are soldiers who usually join the army because they saw something bad on the news and want to defend “freedom,” or because they come from “an army family.” Whatever their reasons, it’s often coupled with simply needing bare necessities and basic income. The army is a nationalized support system guaranteeing three meals a day, housing, basic income, and health care for millions of people. These soldiers are kind of held captive by our government in exchange three meals a day and housing and permission to violate their constitutional rights at any time. That’s why they soldiers call people who are not in the army “civilians.” Because they have become uncivilized—inducted into a cabal of death and at the whim of a giant warring apparatus. The only other government program that offers this much life support to its citizens is in another captive environment: prisons. But when those prisoners and armymen are free, guaranteeing them three free meals daily, housing, basic income, and health care becomes a ludacris suggestion. What is the story with that?
Whether the Ottoman Empire or Ancient Egypt or modern day USA, governments control their populations far and wide by holding them hostage via taxes. This is not unlike the mafioso stopping by the store and forcing the shopkeeper to cough up money in exchange for being in the gang’s good favors.
Your body is free to go anywhere on the globe, but the US will tax you wherever you go. If you avoid your taxes long enough, they will take confiscate everything you own and you’ll be put in jail. This happens to over a million US citizens every year. Only in jail will you be given free healthcare, free housing, and three free meals a day.
And we pay for this system: we pay to support a system which will jail us if you don’t pay into it. Sounds culty the more I dive into this.
School is free for many people, but in exchange you’re required to stand and recite a pledge to the government every day with your hand over your heart. In America, at every turn, you're pulled deeper into this cult of money, individualism, and pride.
NPCs
For most of us, the only thing more appalling than the actual acts of war and genocide occurring in Palestine is the inaction or justifications of our fellow citizens who seem completely content working half the year to give money to a government that only provides basic needs to captive citizens and tells the free people to mostly buzz off. Unless, of course, you’re a corporation, then you can sink the government into debt with exorbitant contracts. And these contracts are paid for with our tax money which is taken out of our paychecks which are often from those same corporations. You think they are paying you, but they are paying themselves and getting your labor on the discount rack. It’s a circle jerk.
Of course it’s not possible to actually be an inactive citizen. Our bodies are where the government gets its power; no citizens, no country. People who “stay out of politics” perceive themselves as uninvolved, but their taxes and their time and their labor actively supports a genocidal state (dunno if I’m talking about the US or Israel right now, same same). They have either completely disassociated from their real involvement or their hearts are truly and frighteningly at peace with the arrangement and ethical trade-off here.
Whatever the case, as a newly minted pro-Palestinian American citizen, part of the fog I’m waking up from is my disassociation with tax money. I don’t just mean income tax, I mean sales tax, business tax, transportation tax, and all the little tax purchases we make.
On the one hand, I see Citizens United asserting that spending money on political campaigns is free speech and cannot be infringed upon—opening the floodgates to mega-donors to taint our political system further. But on the other hand, I wonder: if spending money on politics is a form a free speech, then isn’t my paying taxes exercising my free speech, and couldn’t forcing me to speak, or rather forcing me to pay for specific things, be considered an infringement on my rights? I’m fine with the government forcing me to pay a specific amount, but my inability to control its spending is problematic. Am I becoming an objectivist?
The government-media apparatus goes through great lengths to keep the focus on tax burden. “The Democrats are going to tax you more!” “The Republicans are going to tax you less!” “Here’s a new tax! We got rid of an old tax!” And the conversation barely falls on: “Who cares how much taxes we pay? Leave it the same; let’s focus on how the money is spent.” But if the media and the populace were focussed on how the money was spent, politicians would suddenly have to be held accountable for their legislation and warmongering, and that is why the distractions continue.
Nothing makes politicians more comfortable and powerful than the populace resigning from involvmennt because they feel have no control and never will.
That frees up politicians to do as they please.
Let’s Go Shopping
By way of analogy, I worked with ChatGPT to better understand how my money is spent after I pay my taxes.
I wanted to understand on a more visceral level, what our tax money is being spent on. It helps me to think of it like shopping at a department store. If I know I was going to spend $1000, I’d want to stroll the aisles and pick my favorites. I doubt I would buy the $1000 mystery box.
The first thing I put in my shopping cart would be about $200 of healthcare and safety nets for my friends and family. It’s more like $198.40 because about .8% of our Medicare/Medicaid/Health Program revenue gets lost to fraud (tens of billions of dollars a year). It’s actually more like $138.40 because $60 gets plucked directly to drug companies to subsidize their overpriced drugs. About $130 goes to hospice and services for retired and sick people. Lord knows it’s less than that after all the corporate health organizations take their profits. Anyway. my shopping cart has some syringes, some doctors, and some medical supplies in it. ChatGPT, make a graphic of this. Let’s keep moving.
Next, I stop into the defense aisle and drop about $175 on war stuff. Specifically, I spend $43.75 on guns and missiles and killing machines that I will use to murder people who disagree with me. I spend about $48.75 on healthcare and housing for my soldiers. I spend about $21.87 on help maintaining my military facilities around the world and also developing new killing machines in those facilities. That leaves me with $104 which I’m forced to spend on the Black Box CIA Special. I buy it, but I don’t know what’s in it or how it’s used. The shopkeeper just tells me to trust it’s valuable and in the service of peace and protection.
So, I’ve got about $625 left.
I decide to spend $37.50 on some school and education supplies. I feel bad that this is less than I am spending on healthcare and housing for soldiers since students have a better chance of creating a peaceful world. But I swallow my pride and make my selections. About $1 goes directly to private schools to subsidize their products (tuition) for kids. About $2 goes to school boards and administrative stuff. And the rest goes to public schools: $34.50. That’s $34.50 to support 55 million students while I spend $48.75 to support 1.4 million my soldiers. This makes my heart sink, but the store managers say there is no better way.
I spend about $50 on toilet paper, tape, and other miscellaneous supplies needed throughout government buildings. These products are almost all secured in the form of large contracts with multinational corporations who are charging for their products at a profit margin they determine. And there isn’t much competition since not many suppliers can supply the numbers needed to maintain such an operation as this department store. This $50 goes mainly into the pockets of Staples, Office Depot, Kimberly-Clark, 3M Company, Georgia-Pacific, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson.
Next up I go to the nursery for some fresh air and spend about $17.50 in the environment and gardens aisle. About $2 is spent on supplies to support national parks. I know I am ruining the planet so I support national parks because they will remain mostly untouched by an invasive civilization and everyone can agree that’s a good thing. I add it to my cart.
I spent $5 on mitigating climate change, which was caused by the multinational corporations named above. So I’m paying those corporations $50 for their products and also paying out $5 extra dollars to clean up their mess.
The foreign aid aisle looks a little lopsided. I spend $20 here, and about $4 of that goes directly to Israel. It’s the largest recipient of foreign aid in history and is barely the size of New Jersey. As I’m putting it in my cart, I feel like I’m in a zombified trance: I don’t know why paying for all these cheesy Israeli souveniers. But the shopkeeper tells me it’s in my best interest and I should just keep moving.
We have $570 left to spend.
In the next aisle, I spend about $57 on a bunch of cops uniforms. About $34 of that goes toward salaries so that 700,000 police officers can be housed and fed. I have some sticker shock because I just spent $50 trying to house and feed 34 million people below the poverty line. For what it’s worth, cops also call people civilians and are working for a nationalized organization. But unlike prisonsers and soldiers, cops aren’t really held hostage, instead they get extra-constitutional rights, such as the almost guaranteed right to murder any US citizen if they feel the slightest bit threatened.
I feel for them, so I spend about $20 buying them guns, surveillance, and killing machines so they feel will safe and powerful when the system is threatened. I hope they get the bad guys and kill them!
There is about $402 left.
I spend $100 on infrastructure: roads, bridges, energy, construction. Lord knows how much of this is lost to corporate profit. Infrastructure is important, but until we’re trying to blend into the environment rather than pave over it, this feels like a dumb purchase. 1
On the last aisle there’s a bunch of stuff miscellaneous stuff that I throw into my cart willy-nilly:
Community Development: $25. You know, making the neighborhood nicer, safer, and more sustainable.
Veterans Affairs: $20. You know, tending to the almost 20 million retired employees who used to work for this grocery store.
Cultural and Arts Programs: $15. No comment.
Disaster Relief: $20. Again, outspent by categories which accelerate environmental destruction such as short-sighted infrastructure projects, multinational corporations, and war.
Agricultural Subsidies: $20. You know, you pay the farmers so they can promise to farm even if you don’t want or need what they are buying. It’s like a donation to a farmer because they don’t have any produce you actually want to but the store needs to keep up appearances for other stores.
Legal and Judicial Services: $23.80. You know, supplying lawyers to people who can’t afford them while they are tied up in the legal system. This is, of course less than the $50 we spent in the Jails and Prisons aisle. My tax dollars at work.
Just $50 left.
The final $50 goes directly toward paying off the store’s debts because it’s spending far beyond its means. It might look nice and well-stocked, but it’s operating at a loss. It’s a failing company which gets a lot of good press and foot traffic but none of that changes the fact that the numbers aren’t working out. One day it will go bankrupt and have to be shuttered. One day, its lenders will collect, and I pay $50 to push that day out a little more.
So there you have it. Here is our receipt from the store:
Social Welfare: $200 | 20.00%
War: $175 | 17.50%
Education: $37.50 | 3.75%
Government Supplies: $50 | 5.00%
Foreign Aid: $20 | 2.00%
Police: $57 | 5.70%
Debt Servicing: $50 | 5.00%
Infrastructure: $100 | 10.00%
Community Development: $25 | 2.50%
Veterans Affairs: $20 | 2.00%
Culture and Art: $15 | 1.50%
Disaster Relief: $20 | 2.00%
Agricultural Subsidies: $20 | 2.00%
Legal Services: $20 | 2.00%
Prison System: $50 | 5.00%
Government Administration: $30 | 3.00%
When I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this list, it provided this shocking graphic:
I don’t know what ChatGPT is tripping on, but it seems like it’s some good shit.
I truly believe AI invokes spirits from other realms. In my work with it, I feel like a young boy who found a book of black magic and recklessly starts casting spells.
I also love how inaccurate it is; it’s almost human.
How many people would have to decline to pay taxes for it to be a revolution rather than just a protest?
Love you, thanks for your patience, more soon.
I just went to Thailand and found its roads, from North to South, much better maintained than in the US. I don’t know what to make of this.
Taxes are an illusion to hide the real villain - the government money printer. Tax revenue is small compared to what the government does with the Fed to print money to fund everything - mostly war.
When the U.S. abandoned the gold standard back in 1971 is when the economy began its decline.
Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin, fixes this.
"It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning"
-Henry Ford
Profound