Not these days. Not when they're paying for Bush-era priorities. Now it's just another corporate shakedown.
I've been watching since Nixon as elites, corporate welfare queens and their acolytes in the executive and legislatives branches alter the tax code to reward the rich simply for being rich and penalize the rest of us for being poor or middle class.
But never, even during the shameful reign of Raygun, have I witnessed federal taxes being used to commit so many atrocities -- here and abroad -- screw up more peoples' lives so thoroughly, and blatantly stuff the pockets of the rich elites and corporate ruling classes right out in the open, and dare anybody to object.
I'm pissed off at the fact that the lions share of federal taxes today goes directly or indirectly to the pentagon, along with various "supplemental appropriations" congress rewards Obama with from time to time just because he's so downright charming.
Untold billions more disappear each year into the black budgets of 16 -- count 'em: 16 -- separate spook agencies, many of which used to work exclusively outside US borders but, over the past seven years, have seen their missions change and are now spying on you and me -- and using our money to do it.
Almost as bad, 20.5 percent -- that's the percentage applied to pay just the interest on the massive debt load various republican administrations have inflicted on us as a result of their obsession with plundering the country and transferring the loot to the rich.
Or, as the Concord Coalition put it regarding the 2007 budget:
Spending for interest on the debt in fiscal year 2007 ($238 billion) equaled 20.5% of all individual income tax revenue and more than the net outlays for international affairs ($28.5 billion), general science, space and technology ($21.0 billion), agriculture ($19.6 billion), transportation ($73.0 billion), and education, training, employment and social services ($89.7 billion) combined.
Thanks, assholes. A little money for that other stuff would have been nice.
Every single federal program I support has either had its budget slashed to the point where it can barely function, has already been starved out of existence or, like single-payer health care, was never even born in the first place. But the missile defense shield is very much in business -- even though it's an unworkable and incredibly expensive faux defense program that exists exclusively to funnel yours and my tax money into the pockets of the usual swineherds who run or invest in DoD contractors.
Infrastructure, public education, public health, the social safety net -- dead or dying, in large part because the rich have opted out of their responsibilities as taxpaying citizens, stopped any pretense of creating US jobs in favor of stuffing their numbered accounts and buying massive properties all over the world. They took the jobs they used to create and sent them off to low-wage countries with educated populations, never to return.
And nothing useful has replaced any of this. Instead of pointing fingers at the real problem, the elites propose that we all direct our hostility toward and place the blame on some target group for which they happily supply the bulls-eye -- "illegal" immigrants being the whipping boys du jour -- which absolves them of any blame for the situation.
And because most of us these days seem to be quasi-literate, undereducated, infinitely malleable, simplistic idiots who are easily conned into doing the elites' PR work for them, they've been incredibly successful at avoiding the Place Concorde, guillotine, Madame DeFarge and her knitting needles.
So the upward transfer of societal wealth from the pockets of "the people" to the offshore accounts of the ruling class continues apace.
I say they can all take the proverbial flying fuck at the moon. If we can't round them up and ship them all to Gitmo, at least raise the goddamn marginal earned income rates and double the capital gains top rate.
And while we're at it, instant execution for any rich bastard caught whining about "the death tax." The fewer silver-spoon, insulated, filthy rich little preppy brats flush with their own innate wonderfulness and secure in their sense of entitlement running around screwing up the landscape, the better.
I'll feel good about paying federal taxes the very minute they start paying for policies and programs that help the poor, as well as people of average means. It seems that one way to fund that stuff is by removing huge wads of cash from the pockets of the freeloading bastards who've managed to acquire nearly all the country's wealth without doing a damn thing to deserve it. And they still want more because, for the obscenely rich, there's no such thing as enough.
But that's just my opinion.
wp