When the Government No Longer Respects the Taxpayers

Does the government serve the people who pay the taxes, or do the people who pay the taxes serve the government?

One of the things that has gotten a lot of attention since NYC’s new socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani talked about raising taxes is the staggering amount of money that the city spends in a year versus its population:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was dunking on Zohran Mamdani over this on Fox, and one phrase he used just pops out at you:

If anything, DeSantis UNDERSTATED the difference between the government of Florida, which is known for competently handling hurricanes, and the government of NYC, which is known for crime, sewage smell, and the most batsh*t crazy homeless people on earth.

In any case, the phrase he used that stuck with me is, “They don’t respect the taxpayers…”

What might he have meant by that?

Well, think about it this way: As a taxpayer, what do you EXPECT for your tax dollars?

Personally?

I expect a strong military that keeps Chinese tanks from rolling through the country and an effectively maintained border that keeps illegals, cartels, terrorists, and drug dealers from wandering into our nation at will. I don’t want my house broken into, and I don’t want to see junkies and bums near where I live, so I want an active police force. Additionally, our court system should be fair, just, and prevent the guy who stole my hubcaps from ending up right back out of the streets next week. I also want well-maintained roads, street signs, and basic regulations in place that ensure I don’t end up with industrial solvents in my protein bars or rotten fish in my sushi. I also expect the government to screen immigrants to our country to make sure we’re importing entrepreneurs, rocket scientists and hot Brazilian women, not Third World criminals and welfare recipients.

I would much rather have a voucher system for our schools, but if our government is running them, I expect orderly schools that teach kids about reading, writing, math, and history, not gay pride, gender confusion, and a hundred reasons to hate America. I’d also rather have the post office farmed out to private industry, but since that’s not in the cards, I’d like an efficient, cheap, timely way to mail things out.

There are other things I expect, too. For example, a fire department, my garbage picked up, and a competent foreign policy.

Last, but not least, I don’t have a problem with paying taxes per se. That is part of the price you have to pay to live in a peaceful, well-maintained, well-governed society. However, I do feel like if I am going to be forced to part with money I earned, I do deserve to get the “peaceful, well-maintained, well-governed society” that I am paying for.

Manhattan is just a two-hour non-stop flight from my house, and unlike most conservatives, I LOVE vacationing there. However, one of the many reasons I wouldn’t live there is that they pretty clearly DON’T respect the taxpayers that live in that city. They give career criminals slaps on the wrist, let them roam the streets, and understaff their highly disrespected police department. NYC allows the most dangerous, mentally ill, bizarrely behaving homeless people on earth to go cuckoo for Coco Puffs in the streets and treats people who react to them as the problem, not the homeless people. The city is dirty, not particularly safe and not very well maintained.

Of course, you see the same kind of thing in other big liberal cities like Portland where they allow ANTIFA to cosplay like revolutionaries in the streets with no consequences, Minnesota where the police are held back and left-wingers are allowed to riot for weeks at a time, and California where they give so many free goodies to bums that they’ve turned that state into the homeless capital of planet Earth.

This leads us to ask a fundamental question that applies not just to people who live in these cities, but to everyone in America.

Does the government serve the people who pay the taxes, or do the people who pay the taxes serve the government? Everyone knows what the answer to that question is SUPPOSED to be – especially when we get near election time.

But, if the government serves the taxpayers, then why were millions of illegal aliens allowed to pour across our borders, take jobs that should have gone to Americans, and get benefits from liberal cities or have children on our soil that enabled them to get on the dole?

Why are there people allowed to spend the majority of their lives leeching off those of us who pay taxes, either via welfare or via disability payments, for things as ridiculous as allergies and anxiety?

How is it that career criminals, who prey on ordinary people over-and-over again, aren’t in prison long term? How many chances should we give to people who victimize the people who make the country work over and over again?

In the olden days, countries would threaten or even attack their neighbors to force them pay tribute. It was a Mafia-style approach to foreign policy: “You pay us money, and nothing will happen to you. We won’t kill you, and we won’t let anyone else hurt our meal ticket.” Today, we give taxpayer money to other nations in return for nothing. No tribute. No reward. Half the time, they even publicly trash us. How about at least respecting the taxpayers enough to say that if we give a foreign country aid, they’re going to need to give us something in return? Trade, mineral rights, intelligence, needed bases – SOMETHING worth having?

Do you know what your share of the national debt is currently? It’s $355,250 per taxpayer. Do you know what the median net worth of whole HOUSEHOLDS is in the United States? $192,900. In other words, the government has run up more debt per American than most people have. How is that a responsible use of our money?

What about Social Security? Are the taxpayers being respected there? I could make orders of magnitude more investing the money I pay into Social Security than the government does, but they don’t even have that money anymore because they already spent it. Where’s the care? Where’s the responsibility?

So many Americans rely on the government to take care of Social Security and Medicare, but guess what? All the money paid into both programs has been spent. Furthermore, Social Security has been paying out more than it took in since 2010, and Medicare hit the same point in 2008. If an investment firm did this with your money, you’d want everybody involved to spend the rest of their lives in prison for having their hand in the kitty like this, but we just expect it from the government because they don’t treat us with the respect we deserve.

Understandably, people get upset about partisan issues, but so few people expect our government to even do the basics anymore. When Elon Musk TRIED to cut waste and implement some of the most basic accounting procedures needed to protect taxpayers, people all over Washington went so nuts that he said he was legitimately afraid he might be murdered over it.

Yes, we’re not going to agree on everything, but we should all at least agree that the job of the government is to serve the American people, not vice versa. Taxpayers aren’t “greedy” for wanting to keep the money they’ve earned, the government is greedy for wanting more of it when they aren’t even properly handling the money they have. Our government needs to treat taxpayers as more important than non-taxpayers, handle our money responsibly and act as if taxpayers deserve to get value for the money we pay in taxes because we do. Any government that can’t do that is not fit to rule.

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