The government is spending massive amounts of money. Of course, the government doesn't have its own money; it has our money. What the government does have, however, is a monopoly on force, which can be used against American citizens. One of the government's favorite channels for this force is taxation.
Nobody I know enjoys paying taxes. I enjoy it even less when the government is moving in a direction I'm not happy with, or spending money on programs I don't believe in. I'm paying into Social Security, but soon that will be bankrupt.
I also payed for people to trade in their cars to buy new cars at a discounted price with the Cash for Clunkers program. People honestly believed that the government was giving them money to buy a new car. The government may have given them the money, but you and I financed it. In the movie business, we'd be credited as producers. In the government business, we get credited as suckers.
When preparing your taxes, you need to calculate how much you earned, invested, etc. Nowhere on the form are you made aware of what your tax money is going towards. With all the money the government spends, and all the taxes they collect, you'd think that somewhere (and somewhere easily accessible) you'd be able to find what exactly they're spending it on.
Falling short of a revolution or complete economic collapse, I have a proposition to fixing taxation, as well as the whole of government. The solution? Allocate. When we fill out our tax forms, there should be a list of government programs, well, basically a list of everything the government spends money on. Next to each item on the list, there should be boxes. We, as citizens, would place a check mark in each box that was next to a program we wanted our tax dollars to be spent on. When the IRS received all the forms, they would simply go through and figure out what percentage of check marks each program got. Then, any program that didn't receive enough check marks to balance their budget, would be terminated.
© Nate Phillipps 2010
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