How Should We Spend Our Tax Money?

“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

-          Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

A while ago I read a story about a North Carolina community that defeated a referendum to authorize selling bonds to fund a multi-use bike and pedestrian path.  The main goal of the Cape Carteret referendum was to let residents decide whether they wanted property taxes to be used to pay back bonds sold to fund the project.  It was obvious by the narrow defeat a sizeable portion of town residents wanted the trail finished, although the majority didn’t favor a property tax increase to pay off the bonds.

In light of this defeat, what was the decision of the town fathers?  Appeal to Carteret County, NC, North Carolina state government and the federal government for funding.

It makes you wonder: if the folks in Cape Carteret don’t want to pay, why should the people of Emerald Isle, NC, Raleigh, NC, or for that matter, Dubuque, IA?

So, let me ask you, why is it right for other citizens (at the county, state or federal government levels) to pay for a project that taxpayers in the community don’t want to pay for?

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the way our governments tax and fund spending.

“All Politics is Local”

-          Tip O’Neill

Now, believe me, I’m not against bike trails.  Organizations like the Rails to Trails Conservancy work to find funding for bike and pedestrian trails.  Some of those funds come from government but also from individuals, corporations and charitable groups.

As I see it, the issue is that the further up in the government spending decisions are made, the less accountability there is to ordinary citizens.

For example, if you were asked to decide how to spend our tax monies, would you have funded projects like these:

• $6 million to Boost Egyptian Tourism.

• United States Department of Agriculture allocated research funding to support a summer study that walked 16 dogs—of two different colors — and measured their rectal temperatures.

• Part of a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study Russian cats who were forced to walk on treadmills after having their brain stems snipped.

• $518,000 in federal grants to study how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quails.

• $2.1 million by the NIH to encourage Ethiopians to wear shoes.

I could go on; the list is as seemingly endless as the pot of federal tax dollars to fund boondoggles like these.

Would you have voted to spend your money like this?

It seems like once or twice a month we hear that the federal government is going to send billions to some foreign country to advance the United States’ interests.  At the same time a sizable portion of the taxpaying public can be heard saying “spend the money here – we need help too.”  Do you think the public would approve a referendum to send billions overseas?

We might be willing to overlook some government spending that appears to not benefit our citizens if it was minor, but the evidence is too strong that the federal government is not a good steward of our tax dollars.

The ways that the federal government wastes our money is truly astounding.  The Office of Management and Budget found that, in fiscal 2022, federal agencies wasted $247 billion just in overpayments alone.  If our government was a corporation its entire management team would have been fired at a minimum or, most likely, put in jail.

It’s estimated that the government wastes $1.7 billion just maintaining empty office buildings.

"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." -- Attributed to Everett Dirksen (1896 – 1969), U.S. Senator from Illinois¹

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I wonder if the average person understands how much money a billion dollars is?

In my story Billions and Billions and Billions, I cited an example:

In 2021 the IRS collected $2,268,956,208,000 from 164,187,262 individual taxpayers.  That’s an average of $13,819 that everyone paid, from Warren Buffet to the high school kid flipping burgers.

So, the equivalent of a billion dollars in revenue is produced from taxing the hard work of 72,361 taxpayers.

This means that every time some politician cavalierly proposes spending a billion dollars, he’s spending the taxable efforts of 72,000 taxpayers.  That’s the equivalent of the population of Kalamazoo, MI, Bismarck, ND or Scranton, PA.  And $10 billion is the equivalent of Denver, CO.

But it’s our government so, well, ho hum.

I’d say that any government that can fund snipping cats’ brain stems to see how they perform on a treadmill is incapable of ethically and prudently handling our tax dollars.

We need to make major changes in how we tax and spend.  Just don’t hold your breath for it though.

1. https://www.dirksencenter.org/research-collections/everett-m-dirksen/dirksen-record/billion-here-billion-there