A few things our taxes are funding

Monday was my least favorite day of the year—Tax Day. Throughout the years, I’ve heard people say really dumb things about taxes such as:

• “It’s our patriotic duty to pay taxes. If you don’t pay your taxes you’re a burden on the people;” or
• “I don’t mind paying for taxes because it gives us roads.”

These are some of the most naive and cringe things I can think of to say and that’s for a couple of reasons.

For one, it is not our patriotic duty to pay taxes, and, indeed, I would go so far as to say it is completely un-American to pay taxes under threat of imprisonment or death by the government. The amount of taxes we pay is not something the Founders had dreamed of when it came to the United States. On top of this, I disagree whole heartedly that a person is a burden for not paying their taxes. The government taxation is the burden on the people. When you place blame on individuals rather than on government tyranny, where it belongs, you completely ignore the root of a number of problems that we are currently facing.

As far as not minding paying taxes because “roads,” I got some bad news for those people…

As it turns out, and not surprisingly, roads are a very small part of what U.S. citizens fund against their will. I think if you are one of these people who is “proud” to pay your taxes, then you probably aren’t aware of what you’re funding. Every year I think about the innocent people and animals the government is torturing and murdering with our tax dollars, and that’s not something to be proud of. So, in hopes of giving you a better idea, the following is just a brief overview of a few things us taxpayers fund, whether we like it or not:

1. The torturing and murdering of animals

Taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project is a group made up of millions of animal-lovers and liberty-lovers who believe that taxpayers should not be forced to pay over $20 billion a year to torture and murder animals all in the name of wasteful and cruel experiments. Just to name a few things that the organization has uncovered that the government has funded with our tax dollars include:

• Last year, $13 million in taxpayer money went to Colorado State University and EcoHealth Alliance to build a new lab and import hundreds of bats from Asia to establish a new breeding colony. The bats will be infected with a number of deadly viruses such as Ebola and Nipah.
• $7 million in taxpayer money went to fund a project at the University of Rochester where white coats are “deforming the eyes of healthy cats” for “cruel and redundant experiments.” They have also slaughtered “countless healthy cats” in order to harvest their eyeballs.
• $11.4 million in taxpayer money has gone to funding a project where beagle puppies as young as four months old would be infested with “mutant ticks”. The puppies would be denied any pain relief in these “maximum pain tick infestation experiments” at the University of Missouri.

2. The genocide of innocent women and children

I want to be very clear about this. When I say “genocide” what I mean is the deaths caused through wars. I am one of the most antiwar people you will ever meet. I do not care who started what and why, because the reality is it’s always a government that starts it for their own greedy reasons—and the reasons are always greedy. I can’t think of anything more greedy, more selfish than lying to and radicalizing citizens into sacrificing their health, their sanity, and/or their lives in order to harm others who are often times just innocent individuals who do not have control over what their reckless and regularly oppressive governments do.

It’s honestly really hard to say just how much money is being used to fund the government slaughter of innocent people and that’s due to something that’s been termed the “Ghost Budget” which goes to funding endless wars that the U.S. has no reason to be involved in. What we can safely say is that trillions of our tax dollars have gone to wars where countless innocent men, women, and children have been murdered. Currently, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock, “National Defense and War” is the third largest budget item at over $880 billion after Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

3. The imprisonment of Americans who haven’t hurt anyone

The U.S. government loves imprisoning its citizens. According to Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S. has, as a whole, “over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”

The U.S. locks up more people per capita than any other nation at a rate of 583 per 100,000 residents. Imprisoning this many people isn’t cheap with a system-wide cost of $182 billion per year at a minimum.

You may think that imprisoning this many people means dangerous people are off the street, but the reality is a lot of these people are not dangerous individuals. About 1 in 5 people are incarcerated not for harming people, but for drugs. However, people are incarcerated for even more benign reasons than this. These reasons include misdemeanors, non-criminal violations, probation violations, and parole violations. In fact, in 2019, it was found by the Council of State Governments that supervision violations resulted in nearly 1 in 4 people being incarcerated in state prisons. With that statistic on top of the 1 in 5 people in prison for drugs, we are talking about nearly 45 percent of incarcerated people being imprisoned for reasons that are nonviolent.

4. The funding of inefficient government institutions and services and subsidizing failing businesses

Anything the government can do the free market can do better. From failing public schools to government housing to bailing businesses out of bankruptcy, the government loves infringing in the free market by competing against private businesses and bailing their friends out of bad situations when they are on the losing end in the free market. When a monopoly happens, it’s regularly due to government intervention since monopolies are not usually a natural occurrence in a free market. This infringement leads to an unnatural bloat in prices due to the government competing with private businesses. The difference is: Private businesses can go out of business while the government, regardless of how bad it is, cannot due to it being funded by our tax dollars with the threat of imprisonment or death. On top of government using our tax dollars to fund inefficient institutions, this government infringement and reckless spending further causes a stealth tax known as inflation, which is supposed to go unnoticed as a tax.

In Closing

I hope this has opened your eyes a little to where your taxes are going and how truly wasteful the government is with our money. According to the U.S. Debt Clock, we are well on our way to being $35 trillion in debt, making the debt of each taxpayer over $265,000. The very moment someone becomes a U.S. citizen, whether they are born or immigrate here, they are literally in over $100,000 of debt to the government. I don’t believe enough people understand that the government truly has failed us in a countless number of ways and we have no one to blame but ourselves.